I thought I would never go on a cruise again after Covid but here I am having just booked our first ever cruise on Azamara and looking forward to it so much. (A former Yugoslavia cruise on Azamara Quest starting in Ravenna and finishing in Athens this October).
Reading this thread brought me back to how much I have benefitted over the years from the cruise critic forum and past passengers' willingness to help future passengers have a better cruise experience.
This thread and the wonderful spreadsheet from Grandma Cruising answers almost all my questions, but I couldn't find answers to:
- we drink a lot of sparkling water. I saw that there is a complimentary sparkling water included but can you only get this at dinner or can you just walk into any bar and ask for one whenever the bar is open?
- when getting settled into our stateroom (a balcony) can we ask the attendant to remove all the non complimentary drinks and replace them with complimentary tonic water and sparkling water?
- the ship arrives in Athens at 5am and I have read that all passengers are expected to be disembarked by 9am. Can we expect to have breakfast on board before disembarkation?
I obviously don't have anything to contribute yet about Azamara, but we lived in Italy and I can tell that some people are struggling a bit with Ravenna replacing Venice. While few cities in the world can match Venice, Ravenna was very high on our list of favourite Italian cities. Its Byzantine heritage sites are unmatched in Western Europe, and it's also a very charming and walkable small city in its own right.
The train information on Rome to Rio is seriously wrong. There are direct trains from Bologna to Ravenna and Bologna is on the fast train line from both Rome and Milan, as well as having its own international airport. The Trenitalia site is where to look for train details and this site has a button to change the information from Italian into English.
