GenerationX

Good afternoon from the poolside walkout patio of our cabana room. After lunch Jeremy and I did a little shopping on Las Olas to add to his Hawaiian shirt collection. Then he decided he needed to sleep off some of the lunch with yet another nap, so I threw on my bikini and went out our patio over to the pool bar for a margarita and a dip. The nice thing about these cabana rooms is that when the pool deck is crowded and there’s no shade or louncgers to be found, you have your own private reserved poolside seating and umbrella. An extra perk that I enjoy about this hotel: They seem to have a deal with a spirits distributor to promote certain alcohols at the hotel bars. Last time I stayed here, at checkin, the front desk gave me a voucher for two free Absolut cocktails at the hotel bar. This time, we not only got 2 vouchers for 2 free High Noon canned cocktails at the hotel bar, but also vouchers for 2 free tequila cocktails (made with a craft tequila we’d never hear of, but Jeremy’s philosophy is free tequila is free tequila) at the pool bar. The pool water here is once again a perfect temperature for this low 80’s sunny day. We have dinner reservations at a Cuban spot later tonight so I’m hardcore resisting the urge order the oh so good grilled fish tacos at this hotel for pool bar delivery. The mind reels though that I could even be hungry after our lunch at Casa Sensei. In addition to the ceviche, we also ordered a waygu beef tartare, crab rangoons, tostones and pad kee mow noodles. The noodle dishes at the restaurant can be topped with your choice of protein for additional charge and we decided to go best life and ordered ours with a lobster tail on top. It was a brilliant decision! The crab Rangoon was not your average Chinese takeout and in a very good way. It was made with fresh, sweet blue crab meat and the ratio was about 90% crab to 10% cream cheese mix. The only disappointing dish was the tostones. The plantain chips and shrimp were way under seasoned. I’ve had much better tostones at the Cuban restaurant in the the Hyatt Centric in Miami (don’t sleep on those if anyone is staying there for an upcoming cruise). The restaurant is right next to the launch point for the private gondola tour boats. If you’re looking for a fun and unique lunch/dinner, apparently food from the restaurant can be delivered to the gondolas for you to eat while on your river cruise. While we were eating we saw a family board a boat and pop a bottle of BYOB champagne, then a gorgeous sushi boat was delivered to them to eat while they set sail. Next time Jeremy and I are in FLL pre-cruise I am totally setting that up! I’m going to tackle a few work emails and then maybe doze a little on the patio myself before time to get ready for the evening. Our plan is to spend happy hour checking out a wine bar that we saw on our walk that had a sign saying they’d have live music starting at 6. Then head to our Cubano dinner.

We made it to Miami! For the first time in forever our flight left right on time. It was a nice smooth flight with two very friendly flight attendants servicing first class. I have no idea how those ladies manage to be so energetic and pleasant that early in the morning. Jeremy had the always a solid choice smoked salmon bagel for in flight breakfast. I decided to give the mushroom and asparagus frittata a try. Definitely not the best breakfast I’ll have this week (at least I really hope not), but it was better than the omelette on my flight last month. A $50 Uber ride delivered us to downtown Fort Lauderdale to our hotel, the Hyatt Centric Las Olas. After a much needed nap, we decided to get the circulation in our legs going and took a 20 minute walk down Las Olas Boulevard to have lunch at Casa Sensei. The Las Olas area has tons of great restaurant options all in easy walking distance. I’ve passed this Asian-Latin Fusion restaurant on my morning runs a few times and always wanted to try eating on its nice looking riverfront patio. Btw for anyone following who uses the Riverside Hotel for their pre cruise hotel, right now it looks like there is major, loud jackhammering, street construction going on right outside. Not sure how long it’s expected to last. We’ve just about to get down on some beautiful cocktails and ceviche and it’s really starting to feel like vacation!

It’s 4:30am in STL and we’re boarded and ready to go. Next stop Miami!

REAL CONVERSATIONS FROM MY MARRIAGE TONIGHT… Me: All I’m asking is if there’s 3 or 4 things you could conceivably leave behind so that I can use like ONE LITTLE POUND of your checked bag weight allowance. Jeremy (puts on Billy Zane British accent): You can be blasé about some things, Charla, but NOT about you overpacking for Apex! 2 hour later… Me: I just realized that there is NO first class meal service on this late flight back to STL at the end of the cruise. I mean not that I was planning to eat that late, but it’s the principle! Jeremy (again puts on Billy Zane British accent): Charla is displeased…what to do…🤔

My yoga instructor is always telling me that I should be striving for “balance” in all things in my life. So, for my post-last half day at work, pre-vacation spa treatments lunch, I’m having a fresh, nutritious grilled shrimp and avacado salad…with a side of duck fat fries with garlic chipotle aioli and 2 glasses of Pinot noir. Balance achieved, right? When I checked in for our red eye flight tomorrow morning, my AA app went a little nuts, froze and crashed (NEVER a good sign). When I rebooted, we were all checked in (phew) but I saw that our 3:30 flight home out of Miami at the end of the cruise had been changed to a flight that doesn’t take off till 9pm!!!! Not one to allow such things to even break the top 5 on my list of things to stress about pre-vacay, I decided to do something I’ve seen recommended on cruise forums many times over the years and while I’m eating lunch I booked us a day room at a hotel in Miami for disembark day. I made my booking through Hotels by Day, which a girlfriend recommended over others because they allow you to pay in full in advance (refundable up to 48 hours before check in) for a guaranteed room booking. Apparently many other third party sites let you “reserve” a day room but since they don’t take a deposit or card guarantee, you aren’t actually guaranteed to get a room and it’s essentially no different than just randomly showing up at the hotel the day of and asking if they’ll give you a day room. If the hotel gets slammed with true overnight reservations for that day, apparently you may still be out of luck. I booked our room at the Good Time Hotel on South Beach (co-owned by no other than Pharrell!). I’ve never stayed at this hotel but it passed my “3 check rule”. When researching new hotels/resorts: 1) I won’t even bother with anything that doesn’t have at least a four point/stars/dots total average score; 2) I read over all the reviews written in the past months; and 3) I read the reviews on at least 3 different review platforms. I find it super helpful not only in sniffing out fake or biased reviews, but also I’m getting a sense of the common themes of pros and cons related to a property. I paid a little under $160 to have a room from 10am till 6pm. This way after the cruise we can check in and have a little nap then spend our day by the pool and maybe have an early dinner in South Beach before heading to the airport. I’ll be sure to report on how the experience goes. After lunch I’ll head down to the spa for my pre-cruise massage, facial and pedicure. Then I’m meeting my dad for a quick goodbye dinner and then it’s home to finish packing and get to bed early for a 2am trip to the airport!

We would love to sail with you and Iain! We can totally surprise him with our plan. You guys could just walk into the retreat lounge on embarkation day and Jeremy and I will be sitting there and I will raise my bourbon and peaches and say “cheers Iain! Welcome aboard Intervention of the Seas! Please sit and let’s have a chat.”

I am so sorry to hear this. With what celebrity charges for royal suites these days I would be furious at receiving anything less than excellent service. If you feel comfortable sharing may I ask which ship you were on? Please also keep us posted on what you get as far as response from corporate about your treatment.

This is also a bit dated, but this the Camp at Sea hours, meals and schedule sheet from March of last year on a 4 night cruise. You may need to zoom in to see it well. Im not sure when your cruise is but my 10 year old and I will be on Solstice next month and I’m happy to share more updated info from that sailing if it would be helpful.

Yesterday I received two emails from the shoreside Retreat Concierge team. The first was regarding my (spoiler alert) recently booked bargain April solo sky suite cruise on Beyond, for which I’ve been emailing back and forth with the general customer service email address about similar booking issues (missing perks, random balance due email when the cruise was paid in full at booking, etc.). The email yesterday from the concierge apologized for all of the errors and had attached an updated, correct invoice showing no balance due and all perks included. The second email was regarding this Apex cruise and the concierge included a link to a form that she requested I fill out regarding preferences for our sky suite on our (very soon!) upcoming cruise, including options for the type of wine we’d like in our suite for embarkation. She also invited me to call or email her if there was anything else that we need last-minute assistance with before we sail. I thought about emailing her regarding my ongoing quest and to get perks resolved and properly documented for this cruise. But just out of curiosity, I checked and our beverage packages are now showing on our express passes and our paid gratuities and premium Internet seem to be reflected in the cruise planner! I’ve had outreach and assistance from the Retreat shoreside concierge when sailing in a Celebrity Suite or higher, but never before in a sky suite. Does anyone know if this is now officially a standard thing for sky suites? If so, having dedicated shoreside assistance, even at the lowest suite level, to step in and get issues like this resolved when they pop up is a nice additional perk. Sharing pics of the preference form below. I’ve seen that there’s sometimes a disconnect between the shoreside and onboard teams, so it will be very interesting to see if our preferences/requests actually come through.

Aloha! Great to have you along again! We have ventured into Alaska cruising and Bermuda, but venturing much further than that has been a bit of a challenge due to Jeremy’s vacation time allowance. Up until this year he only got 2 weeks of paid vacation for the entire year, so with other family travel commitments around the holidays, etc. it was difficult for us to make a longer cruise or a 7 day that required a few days of travel time added on happen. As of 2023 though, he’s been bumped up to 3 weeks paid so we are looking at doing a more adventurous trip this November/December to celebrate Jeremy’s 40th birthday. We’re considering Hawaii or South America with maybe a Panama Canal crossing. I’m also trying to lobby him to spend a bit bigger and do Galapagos on Flora, but he insists on adulting and going on about the need for funds for appliance upgrades at our house. 🙄 I on the other hand would cheerfully spend a year scrubbing our laundry using a metal tub and a washboard like a medieval peasant if it means I get to go to Galapagos!

I am so so sorry to hear about your husband. I hope that his treatment goes as smoothly as such things can go, and that you two are back out on the seas soon.

Welcome to cruise critic and welcome back to cruising! To find the drink menus: -Download the Celebrity app and log in with your Celebrity username and password. -I assume your Apex cruise is your closest cruise coming up, so the app should automatically load that cruise and give you a home page for it that looks like the screenshot below. -Go into Dining at the bottom left and then swipe over at the top of the screen to Bars & Lounges and it will show you all the bars on the ship. If you click into each bar, it will let you view the drink menu for that bar. Drink menus for all the restaurants are also included within the posted dining menu for the restaurant. Hope this helps!

Thank you so much for the suggestion! It looks like they are pretty much booked up other than one slot at 5pm and Jeremy refuses to eat dinner that early. I will definitely put this on the to do list for my next cruise that docks in PR and make my reservations much earlier. The menu does look amazing!

I realized after booking this cruise that we would be getting home just a little over 2 weeks before Gen Z and I turn around and leave for our mother-daughter spring break cruise on Solstice. Which means I have to do some planning for BOTH cruises this week before we fly to Miami. (I know, you all have so much sympathy for my strife.) Today Gen Z had the day off school so we did a little cruise wardrobe shopping then went for lunch. With all the recent trepidation about the lobster available at sea, I decided to stop by Red Lobster and get my fix in advance for the low, low “cruise fare” of $55 including premium beverage and gratuity. Problem solved. 😂 Speaking of eating, allow me to share a little about Jeremy and I’s food and fun plans on Apex. This booking came with a generous $800 in OBC so we decided to indulge in some excursions and specialty dining. Our ports on this cruise are San Juan, St. Thomas and Tortola. Jeremy and I have done San Juan many times, so we plan to stay onboard for that port and enjoy a quieter ship. For St. Thomas, after I came home from a solo cruise excursion there with tales of swimming with a wild sea turtle, Jeremy was very confident that he wanted to snorkel. So we’ve booked the Turbo Catamaran Snorkel and Beach escape. In Tortola, since Jeremy got to pick the St. Thomas excursion, I decided we’d do a trip I wanted to do on my last port stop and booked the last two spots on an excursion to the Virgin Gorda Baths. For onboard dining, we have specialty dinner reservations at Fine Cut and Raw on 5 and will be continuing my E Class first night dinner tradition of dining at my favorite: Eden. We also plan to try and book a lunch at Le Grand Bistro and one at Rooftop Grill. I also booked us a poolside cabana for the last sea day. Beyond that, I imagine our schedule will include significant amounts of poolside reading, gambling (primarily Jeremy) and wine events (primarily me). I’ve also noticed a few cooking demos in the schedule that I’m chomping at the bit to attend and I plan to drag Jeremy to at least a couple of the production shows so that he can experience the E class theatre. We’ll be flying into Miami on a redeye the day before the cruise and will be staying at a hotel in FLL in the Las Olas neighborhood. Only 2 more days at the office left then there’s just a spa trip and packing left between us and vacation!

Thank you! I kind of took a live and let live position on his habit for a long time because he’s a grown man after all and as you said we all have our vices. It really started to worry me though when I could tell his asthma was getting worse. We both got the flu this winter and Jeremy got much sicker than me and barely got out of bed for over a week. The doctors said the smoking was probably a factor in why he got so sick. I think it was the wake up call that he needed.

A quick caution/suggestion for anyone else who booked or made any updates to a Retreat, AQ class or Al package cruise in the last week or so: Check your guest invoice and cruise planner order history carefully and make sure that it reflects all of your included perks. Just after Valentine’s Day, I booked 2 sky suite cruises (this one and one in April) online directly through the Celebrity website. On the last screen before the final click before fully booking, for both cruises the screen showed that the cruises include the standard Retreat perks of premium wifi, premium beverage package and prepaid gratuities, plus OBC. However, for both cruises, when I received my booking confirmation guest invoice from Celebrity, the premium wifi, premium beverage package and prepaid gratuities didn’t show up on the invoice as they have in the past. Since I booked this cruise so close to sail date, I was able to immediately check Jeremy and I in on the app and view our express passes, and noticed that they also did not have the PALL on them for the premium beverage package inclusion. Doing some online searches revealed a few recent posts on other forums about Celebrity cruisers having issues with inclusions disappearing from their bookings and being told by shoreside that there was a “glitch” in the system last week. I emailed Celebrity customer service attaching my invoice and explaining my concern and asking for confirmation that all of the perks were included with my booking and, if so, requesting an updated invoice confirming it (in case I have to do battle with guest services on the ship). In less than 24 hours (yay!) I received what seems like a somewhat copy paste response (boo) from customer service stating that premium wifi, premium beverage package and prepaid gratuities are included in all Retreat bookings and that a corrected invoice was sent under separate cover. The good news is the auto-sent updated invoice for this cruise that I received shortly thereafter does reflect included wifi and beverage package. The bad news is: 1) the promo code for the wifi looks like it is the standard wifi, not premium; and 2) the prepaid gratuities are still not reflected as included. Additionally none of the perks show up in my order history in the cruise planner as they usually do, and our express passes still don’t reflect a beverage package. On my ever growing list of things to do today and tomorrow is to find time to put in a call to Celebrity and wait on hold (ugh) and see if everything can get straightened out before we sail. Worst case, I’ll be bringing a print out of the email stating that all perks should be included onboard with us and hopefully it can all be resolved with a meeting with the Retreat concierge as soon as we board (and hopefully a quick one so that we can get right to the more important and fun job of showing Jeremy around his first E class ship)!

Thank you Jim! Is the Apex cruise part of the semi-side by sides that you have coming up? If I remember correctly you have a few cruises coming up on Celebrity and I think Ponant that are not too far apart?

Looking forward to sailing with you! Hope to meet you guys onboard!

Thank you! I did look at MSC but this time Celebrity won the budget battle. We had somewhat specific departure and return dates to work with due to our work schedules and within our window, the only options on MSC were a 7 night on Seascape and a 4 night on Miraviglia. We really wanted to sail a full week, and Jeremy wasn’t crazy about sailing out of Orlando, so that dropped the 4 night out. The 7 night on Seascape only had royal suites available and those were priced at over twice the price of the SS on Apex.

Oh I’ll have to pop over and follow your Azamara live! I’ve been meaning to start reading up on the line as we start looking at trying a smaller higher end cruise line. Have a wonderful cruise!

Done! Such is the curse of chubby thumbs. Although spending over a month cruising does sound like a dream come true!

Well hello fellow cruisers! I didn’t expect to be back on a ship so soon after my Silhouette/Divina side by side last month. However, I was completely at a loss for what to give my better half for a Valentine’s Day gift this year (and to celebrate him FINALLY following doctor’s orders and doing away with his asthma-aggravating cigarette smoking 20-year habit 🙌🏾) and the pricing and work schedule stars aligned, so in 4 days the hubs and I will be flying to Florida for a last minute booking 7 night Caribbean cruise on Apex! Who’s up for another live review? A quick about us: I’m Charla and the man currently sitting on the couch going through the Celebrity app making a checklist of all the cocktails he plans to try onboard is Jeremy. We live about an hour south of St. Louis, MO on our small 12 acre hobby farm and enjoy hiking, kayaking, fishing and camping. We cruise for the warm weather, good food I don’t have to cook, and as evidenced above, drinks and fun. We’re both seasoned Celebrity cruisers and if my math is correct this cruise will bump us up into Elite Plus. I’ve lost track of how many cruises post-shutdown this will be for me, but this will only be Jeremy’s second, after our Bermuda cruise last July on Summit. This cruise will also be Jeremy’s first time sailing E-class and I’m anxious to see if he likes it as much as I do. For me, I’ve sailed on Edge and Beyond, but this will be my first time on Apex. Actually, after this cruise, I will have officially sailed on every non-Galapagos ship in the current Celebrity fleet! This cruise we’ll be sailing in a sky suite that I booked as a suite guarantee and received our cabin assignment for within 24 hours. As mentioned above, my last cruise just last month was a (fantastic) solo yacht club sailing on MSC Divina (immediately after stepping off the Silhouette), so it will be interesting coming back to Celebrity and to the Retreat experience on a newer ship. In the coming days I’ll do a a couple of posts with details on booking and our plans on shore and onboard. As always if there’s anything in particular inquiring minds would like to know about, please don’t hesitate to ask. Looking forward to taking everyone along on another cruising adventure!

I feel like this thread is basically turning into a roll call! So…see everyone for a meet up drink in the retreat lounge after embarkation lunch…around 2pm? 🤣

Oh this is so exciting! I look forward to meeting you too! Fair warning, I may get excessively excited at the sight of another map dress on embarkation day. I’ve been waiting for that moment for a while. 😂

We are in the same boat! I saw this thread just hours after surprising Jeremy with a Valentine’s Day gift of a last minute booking for a sailing on Apex at the end of next week. Between that, my long ago planned sailing next month with my daughter on Solstice, and now this cruise. I will be cruising 3 months in a row! It’s so extra, but hey, Celebrity made us an offer we can’t refuse. I hope you enjoy Seascape next month! I’d love to hear your thoughts on that one (during or afterwards) as I’m sailing on that ship in July…wow, this cruising addiction is something 🤦🏾‍♀️ I’ve gotten into a habit now of not booking anything in Celebrity retreat without price comparing MSC and this cruise was over $1500 cheaper than a yacht club suite on Seaside the same week, even paying solo supplement. This one and our Apex next week are the first time in months that I’ve seen Celebrity Retreat pricing beat out MSC yacht club pricing for my potential sail dates. Looking forward to meeting you in person!