gardengalaz

Hi, Everyone! I just watched a video about the new packages that Princess is offering and something VERY interesting caught my attention. On our next Celebrity cruise, our premium drinks packages is costing $109 per person per day (drinks up to $17 each) -- yet Princess' new Premier package includes premium beverages (drinks up to $20 each) and MUCH more (wifi, tips, specialty dining, exercise classes) and their entire package is $80 per person per day!! So do you think Celebrity will do something similar and give us more for our money (HA!!), or is Princess more likely to see how wildly under-priced their package is and adjust accordingly??

OH please don't stop PUP opportunities now! I'm just ONE point away from Elite status!

We also received ours. I can't find where we were actually awarded the points for the March "quiz" -- so any advice on how to check that out would be very helpful.

Just completed the TA on Silhouette and the quality of the meats served has definitely deteriorated over the 5 Celebrity Cruises I've sailed in the past 2 years. As someone on the ketogenic diet, I can only speak to the proteins themselves. Steaks are smaller, thinner and tougher. Chicken breasts are smaller thinner and dryer. The "prime rib" served in the MDR looked and tasted surprisingly like the steak. The quality of cold cuts on the buffet were definitely a step down from those offered on prior cruises. Meats on the carving station were less readily available, less juicy and not as tender. Burgers in the Mast Grill were dense in texture and less-meaty in flavor. Perhaps it was more about the preparation than the starting ingredients, but our voyage was only half-full, so it's not like the kitchen staff were stretched for time to do things right.

Very good point. Generally, I still with oil & vinegar but with a caesar, I ask for it on the side and just dip the tips of my fork into it for a little bit of flavor.

Thank you so much for the kind words!

Thanks for another great idea! I've never even thought about sushi since the rice thing .. bus sashimi is a totally different thing! We still have a full day left here on our Silhouette cruise, so maybe that's dinner tomorrow. I was also thinking about the Lawn CLub Grill -- but $50 for a steak, although better quality for sure, seems a bit pricey.

The muesli station is a GREAT idea -- I never even look over there since it's all carbs. Thanks for the suggestion. Ice cream station on this cruise has only sprinkles and those syrups ... no nuts there on this cruise.

Hi, Everyone -- This post is intended exclusively for people on the ketogenic diet who want to stay on a clean, keto way of eating while on a Celebrity Cruise. For those of you who are not on keto, please don't be unkind or judgmental in your comments. For many of us, keto, as restrictive as it is, has been life-changing. You will have no problems whatsoever at the breakfast buffet. Every type of egg, breakfast meats and low-glycemic index foods like sautéed mushrooms are available in grand abundance. At lunch, no problems again because the grill area is open, so you'll have all of the grilled chicken breast and steak you want -- and often fish as well. There is a rather extensive salad bar that does have cold sliced chicken, sometimes cold sliced beef and real bacon, chopped eggs and some cheeses, so that's an option. There are some cold cuts, but if you're on truly CLEAN keto, you wouldn't want those anyway. Late lunch, you can always go the Mast Grill and order a couple of burger patties ... add some cheese and bacon if you want to fancy things up a bit. Dinner in the MDR is fine since there is always grilled salmon, grilled chicken breast and grilled sirloin available. Paired with a simple caesar salad (no croutons, of course) and you're good to go. That said, dinner in the buffet can, on first glance, be an impossibility since the grill area isn't usually open for dinner and the carving station isn't always offering something to carve. While there are plenty of options for people eating the SAD, with rare exceptions everything is either smothered in a gravy or sauce of some sort or a rice dish. The salad bar is also an option. The best thing that happened for me during dinner in the buffet was that the chef and maitre'd noticed I was sitting with my sister without any food in front of me and asked me if I wasn't eating. I explained I was on a specific diet -- and at first they encouraged me to go off of my diet since I was on vacation, but after I told them what a giant mistake that was for people on keto, the chef said he understood completely and quite literally pleaded with me to let him know whenever I was having dinner in the buffet and he would happily make me a steak or chicken or piece of fish .... whatever I needed to both enjoy my cruise and stay on my diet -- and that's precisely what he did. THAT is the kind of service you can count on on Celebrity ... and I only wish I had known that was a possibility earlier in the cruise. Before that happened, I would have given you one piece of advice: pack a bunch of ziplock bags and grab some extra grilled chicken or steak from the lunch buffet to eat at dinner. For our entire cruise, I didn't see any fresh avocados or nuts, so you can't count on those for your healthy fats macro. As far as allowed fruit is concerned, the only berries I saw were garnishes on some of the desserts offered on the buffet ... so your 20-grams of carbs daily max will come from lettuce and incidental things. Bottom line ... it's VERY possible for you to have a lovely cruise and still stay in ketosis.

Just a quick note to clarify two things the OP mentioned ... I'm also on this Silhouette sailing .... we are in Portland (Dorset), a small port island 15 minutes drive from Weymouth ... and the ship parked next to us is the Regal Princess. LOVELY day ... charming town ... would be very interested in coming back here on a land vacation to enjoy Weymouth when there aren't 2 cruise ships in port. LOVING your posts!!!

My husband always wears a jacket and tie on the Chic nights. Truly, he's in the minority ... and tuxedos are increasingly rare indeed ... but jacket and tie are the standard for him.

We are currently on day 8 of our crossing aboard the Silhouette. Since leaving Bermuda 4 days ago, it's been very cold and raining quite a bit and the wind has been strong to the point that all exterior decks have been closed to passengers. It's been rocking and rolling non-stop, but not bad from a seasoned cruiser's perspective. Here's a little video I just captured from our sunset veranda stateroom. I would have stepped outside to take a better video, but our veranda floor is sopping wet. Movie on 4-27-23 at 1.46 PM.mov

The situation was completely solved before I even posted -- I just wanted to warn people.

After my transatlantic voyage this week, I will be ONE POINT shy of Elite status. Surely, there's got to be an easy way to get ONE point???

My husband and I have brought our 2 MacBook Pros and our 2 iPhones on more than a dozen Celebrity cruises and we have NEVER even put them in a drawer. They just sit on the counter space below the TV so we can easily keep things plugged in. As others have said, there's no way that the 15" laptops could fit into the regular safes.

Hi, Everyone! I am blessed to have an amazing sister who's treating me to a transatlantic cruise leaving later this week. I thought I'd surprise her and pre-pay our gratuities. So,I went to the website, found our reservation and clicked on the little "add gratuities" link ... and was SHOCKED by what I saw (SEE SCREENSHOT). I even called Celebrity to see what the problem was. Our total gratuities are $455, BUT in order to add that now, Celebrity automatically RE-PRICES the entire reservation, which means we would LOSE $600 of our original discount AND our $400 OBC! I was told that changes can only be made prior to the final payment. I said, "WHY doesn't it SAY that on the screen where you're encouraging me to pre-pay the gratuities? WHY would ANY passenger EVER do that?" and the representative said that people do it all the time and generally don't notice the cruise price changed!! "So it's gonna cost me an EXTRA $1000 AND I lose the $400 OBC -- all to pre-pay $455 of gratuities?, I asked." He said, "That's correct. It's all explained in your cruise contract." So I said I'd just pay for them onboard. It's really craziness like this that will drive me to another cruise line FAR more so than all of the little cuts in service and increases in price they've introduced! BOTTOM LINE: Be sure to LOOK at the pricing breakdown BEFORE you click on PAY.

One of our closest friends is on a very extended cruise aboard the Equinox at this very moment. She confirmed that Starlink is now providing their internet service. She was planning to upgrade to a 2-device streaming package since she still sees patients while she's at sea -- and the basic package hasn't been fast enough for video chats, at least in her experience. I'll also ask her to run a speed test if you'd find that interesting.

Just found this .... hopefully the link will work: https://maritime-executive.com/article/video-celebrity-s-newest-cruise-ship-rescues-cuban-refugees

The are provided with medical care, food, clothing and shelter until the earliest opportunity the ship and the authorities can rendezvous. I'm not sure WHICH authorities ... next port ... nearest port ... US Coast Guard ... depends on where they're picked up??? I assume they aren't put in the brig or given free movement on the ship ... secured in whatever staterooms the ship has for such things? Anybody know the maritime rules that govern rescued people at sea? I do know that all ships are required to render assistance to anyone in distress.

Well after reading everything on this thread and several related threads, DH and I are rather concerned. We completed two cruises in December (Beyond and Solstice) and noticed that food quality, variety and availability were definitely slipping fast -- but we've already scheduled 4 consecutive cruises on Equinox starting at the end of January AND a transatlantic crossing a couple of months later. Now, we'd love to cancel them all and find a different line (or simply bank our money until the cruise industry sorts out the madness and competition resumes to reclaim and retain cruisers.) Alas, we're too close to sailing to cancel without large penalties, so we'll just travel as planned and hope for the best. Of all the changes people have mentioned (most of which we genuinely don't care about), the one we hope is just a rumor is that the Classic Entreés may be removed from the MDR menu. DH is a dedicated bodybuilder and sticks to his diet regime even on a cruise ... and that means plain chicken breast or a plain piece of salmon four to five times a day. He always wants to hit the buffet after the show to grab a grilled chicken breast or two to eat as his bedtime snack. I guess we'll need to grab a few off of the lunch buffet and put them in our stateroom fridge instead. After the crossing, no future X cruises for us until things settle down.

We routinely stop by Guest Relations and ask them to be sure our accounts are merged into a single account. We still received an itemized report of the activity on each of our individual accounts, but the OBC and charges all flowed into and out of a single place. Takes the staff just a minute or two and all is well.

We recently (yesterday) completed a voyage on the Solstice. Our check-in time was 12:30PM. With no where else to go after checking out of our hotel, we arrived at 11:00AM expecting to hang around outside until our appointed time. Perhaps it's because the ship was just slightly more than half-full, but there was no one in line ... NO ONE. So the staff running the whole embarkation process were calling out "If you'd like to board now ..." From that moment, we barely stopped moving to complete a step of the routine and were onboard in, quite literally, less than 10 minutes. WAY more staff than needed to embark the passengers on our trip ... so the staff was just sorta standing around waiting to actually DO something. That experience aside, our cruise three weeks ago on the Beyond was run with Swiss precision and a strict adherence to the timeline .. but the ship was packed. Bottom line, we've experienced both extremes. So, if you show up early and there's a line, no one deserves to jump the line ... so ya just gotta wait your turn (unless you're one of those horrible people who decide to put the crew members and staff in an impossible situation where they have no choice but to accommodate you with a smile on their face or become the target of the entitled). But if there's no one in line, the shore-side staff does like to "get ahead" of the rush and will eagerly invite you to board early.

Absolutely! I've recently been on both the Equinox and Beyond and both had the silent disco.

Thanks! It's been a frequent feature of many of our previous cruises, so we're staying onboard and enjoying a relatively quiet ship.

Day 5, St. Thomas, 9:33AM Speed Test: