My wife and I have taken over 60 cruises with almost 40 being with Celebrity. Our most recent Celebrity cruises were a trans-Atlantic on Apex a year ago and a Caribbean cruise last month on Constellation out of Tampa.
What a difference, and yes I know they are completely different classes of ship, but I have never before seen a serious difference in food quality between different classes of ships. The Constellation cruise was a disappointment. In the main dining room food took a really long time to be served (the dining room staff were still excellent). In our opinion the dinner selections were nothing what we have been used to. On previous cruises we often had trouble deciding between a few good choices. On this cruise we had trouble finding something we wanted.
One night, in an effort to find a better selection, we went up to OceanView for dinner. The changes there were a problem as well. The grill was closed – no steaks, or pork, etc... The stir fry station wasn't open and overall the buffet selections were greatly reduced.
There was a LOT of grumbling about the food onboard. Several people suggested that the best staff and food were being sent over to the newer ships leaving the smaller ships to become step children. This isn't the problem as we got hold of Celebrity's new fleet wide menus last week and it was the same as we experienced on Constellation.
We have no problem with the service onboard except that it has been significantly reduced. It wasn't unusual to spend over a half hour in a lounge before being waited on.
We have also made several cruises in the same time frame on Royal Caribbean and we have also seen their new menus and we have no issues with the food. Over the rest of this year we are booked on 5 Royal Caribbean cruises, mostly because of itineraries, but are booked on Millennium in a year for back to backs lasting almost a month, and we are concerned. That's a long time to not be happy with food choices but, the good news is, that gives Celebrity a year to realize they have an issue and work at fixing it.
