And yet another Explora review (with some tips on how to maximize the experience)

[lelak]

We are a few weeks back from 19 days onboard--Vancouver roundtrip to Hawaii, so lot of sea days.

One major caveat--the ship was less that half full (about 350 passengers), so some of our very

positive experiences may not be duplicated when the crew to passenger ratio isn't almost 3 to 1!

Also, my comments come from over 40 cruises on mainly luxury lines (Crystal, Silversea, Regent,

Seabourn (and Oceania which in a "Upper Suite" is in most respects a luxury line)).

 

In many respects this was a tale of two cruise lines.  First the positive:

1.  The crew could not have been friendlier or more responsive (except the front office staff, see below)

They knew our names almost immediately and responded to almost any request.  For example, at one

dinner we were chatting with the "restaurant manager" (one step below the overall F&B manager)

and remarked that the gelato choices in the gelateria were rather limited.  He asked what we'd like

and we told him coffee gelato.  He told us it would be available the next day and sure enough when

we asked at the gelateria they had made a big tub just for us (which we enoyed off and on for the

next 14 days).  

2.  The Emporium Marketplace is a superb concept, clearly better than the best buffets on the above

mentioned lines.  The freshly cooked pasta, sushi, and salad stations (yes they now have thousand

island dressing!) were particular favorites and there was no need to wait around while they were

preparing dishes--crew were happy to bring to our table (would this be true if the ship were full?)  We

even did something we never do on the other ships--had dinner at the "buffet" with three or four

nicely grilled lobster tails brought to us as main courses.

3.  The ship itself was gorgeous--everything was immaculate.  Four pools, an amazing number of

huge spa pools, and despite what others have noted, we never experienced a problem in finding

a way to lounge in the shade.

4.  In general, the food was excellent (a few negatives noted below) at all the restaurants No problem

in eating wherever or whenever (again others have noted this isn't true when ship is closer to full).

They handled my wife's gluten free request extremely well.  She is the family oenophile and did find

some drinkable wines on the included list, but more importantly was impressed by the quality on

the discounted premium list and how close the discounted prices were to internet pricing on the

two or three she purchased.  I haven't seen much said about this option and wonder whether it

was new to our cruise.  I've seen some controversy about Anthology.  We used our OBC for it

and found the meal superb--extremely close to the meal at Claude Le Tohic's O' restaurant

in SF--actually a bit cheaper for the almost identical meal on land and no $100 upcharge for

the wagyu beef.  I don't know if we would have spent the money if we didn't have the OBC, but

it definitely a culinary highlight.

5.  Our Cove Residence was very well laid out and very comfortable.  The bathroom is small (although

shower is huge) compared to other luxury lines and it is weird they have a heated floor but not

a heated mirror--so wiping with a washcloth needed if you want to see yourself after showering!

6.  Cruise director Michael a hoot especially at trivia which he converted into a personal cabaret show.

(He is moving to Explora 2 soon).

7.  We enjoyed the two resident singers and went to all their shows.  Sight  lines in the show room

excellent--no pillars, etc.

8.  Best internet I've every seen (and I'm a computer scientist) at sea.  Download speed mostly 

100 mps and upload close to that.  Better than at our location at home.  Easy to stream anything

and no blockage of sites.  The fact that were technically in the US the entire trip at sea helped eliminate

the need for using any  VPN almost the entire trip.

 

Minor negatives:

1.  No production shows (this could be anything from irrelevant to a major negative depending on personal taste).

2.  All fixed menus (some minor variants day to day).  However, halfway through the cruise they added five

additional main courses to both Fil Rouge and Med Yacht Club, so perhaps they were listening to comments for

such a long cruise.

3.  We're from N. Cal. so Asian food snobs.  Sakura was a mixed bag.  Huge variety of sushi of all types and

excellent quality.  Lots of excellent appetizers (although I'd suggest asking for the lobster and soft shell

crab rolls without the very spicy mayo or other sauce as it drowns out the delicate shellfish flavor).  Main courses

were not so good--salmon very overcooked/dry, Pad Thai tasty but nothing close to actual Pad Thai--laughably

wrong noodles and missing the characterisic tamarind flavor entirely, curry almost devoid of spice.  At a second

visit they cooked the salmon properly, added a decent amount of spice to the curry, and gave me a separate

bowl of tamrind sauce to add to the still wrong noodles for the Pad Thai (but there was lots of lobster!)

Two big misses they really should fix:  1.  no tea menu or asian tea variety, 2.  only one sake' available.  Both

Oceania and Regent do this much better in their Pan Asian restaurants.

 

Major negatives:

1.  As noted by myself and others before on CC, by far the worst website not just of any cruise line,

but any customer facing company.  In all our previous cruises I never used our TA for simple tasks

like restaurant reservations.  I analyze websites as part of my work and in just a brief review of

Explora's I found over a dozen serious to fatal problems in any other case would cause the website

to be taken down for repair and another beta test (if they even did one in the first place).

2.  While the internet was superb, the onboard IT infrastructure was not.  The onscreen menu

had several significant flaws--for example the tab for showing  one's onboard account didn't work.

3.  While the majority of the crew was superb and in fact both friendly and responsive, that did not

carry over to the financial management staff.  As noted above, you couldn't see your onboard

account on your room TV and when we got a printed statement it was the most confusing

balance sheeet I've ever seen.  With three days to go we finally figured out we were missing half

of our onboard credit from Virtuoso and they refused to fix it without "documentation" which

because of the non-functional website we only had the email accounting from our TA.  This finally

got fixed post cruise by our hardworking TA, but you would think both the onboard staff and the

head office would know what their deal was with the huge Virtuoso consortium.  No big deal

except for the early morning calls from the front desk repeatedly asking for documentation,

although we did end up leaving about 40 Euros unused because of the foul-up.

 

A few tips:

1.  Believe it or not, unlike on all the other above-mentioned lines, you actually can

(in some cabins easy, in others requires some nimble fingers) attach an HDMI

table to the TV and display whats on your laptop (so we watched on a large screen

our streaming services included what we recorded on YouTube TV).  On the

onscreen menu go to "Your Home at Sea" and "Connections" then the far right

choice of "HDMI," the down to "Confirm" (or something like that).  Before you

do that, connect your HDMI cable to HDMI1 on the rightside back of the TV.

This is easy if you have a room where the living room TV is on a swing out

mount like ours was, trickier if it's on a fixed wall mount like our friend's cabin

was.  That required someone with smaller fingers than find getting the HDMI

cable into the socket--depending on the room lighting you might need another

person holding a cellphone flashlight so the nimble fingered person can see

the socket.  Since Explora does provide this menu option they really ought to

either have an HDMI port on the USB area next to the TV, or have an HDMI

cable already attached to the TV port for your use.

2.  This has already been noted, but it did work for us.  If you have a Residence,

the champagne in the room is the cheap complimentary stuff served throughout the ship.

However, if you ask your butler nicely for the promised 2013 Dom Perignon it

did magically appear in our refrigerator a couple days later.

3.  If you want something, ask for it.  This seemed to work almost as well as on

Crystal (at least the Old Crystal, we haven't tried new Crystal yet).

 

Bottom line:  we would definitely book Explora again, even given the additional

strain on our TA, most likely on a 14+ day voyage where occupancy was likely

nowhere near capacity if they have any of those again.  I think we've learned how

to "navigate" the line appropriately!

 

[HappyInVan]

Good review. I largely agree with your observations. Good wifi, good service from lack of pax, disappointing Sakura, luxury buffet. 

 

IMO, their 'curry' is the Hong Kong or Japanese variety. Not Thai as advertised on the menu.

 

Don't know how long they can carry on, particularly with the huge prices for Explora 2.

[uktog]

Great balanced review thanks. For us Sakura tastes were great because we can only manage mild. I think next cruise we will ask them to go light on spices as they (rightly) may have turned the dial up on spices based on feedback. 
Glad you enjoyed your adventure 

[At Sea At Peace]

11 hours ago, lelak said:

 

Major negatives:

1.  As noted by myself and others before on CC, by far the worst website not just of any cruise line, but any customer facing company.  In all our previous cruises I never used our TA for simple tasks like restaurant reservations.  I analyze websites as part of my work and in just a brief review of Explora's I found over a dozen serious to fatal problems in any other case would cause the website to be taken down for repair and another beta test (if they even did one in the first place).

 

 

 

Thanks for the review.  Nice.

 

Just would like to highlight the 2nd biggest flaw in the Explora Journeys business model (#1 being failure to use it's MSC Yacht Club base cross marketed with a loyalty promotion) - one cannot, essentially, use their website to select a cruise, a stateroom, price, select and hold or deposit.

 

Seriously, we're half empty, please book a cruise with us.  Well, not with us, you have to find someone with an active stateroom availability website (or call us).

[mnocket]

15 hours ago, lelak said:

This has already been noted, but it did work for us.  If you have a Residence,

the champagne in the room is the cheap complimentary stuff served throughout the ship.

However, if you ask your butler nicely for the promised 2013 Dom Perignon it

did magically appear in our refrigerator a couple days later.

Is this really a common occurrence?  If so, that's very disappointing, as it's essentially saying, "we will give you an inferior product if we can get away with it".  If it was just an oversight, then that's a different matter. 

 

Overall, I've been favorably impressed by what I've read about EJ, and I'd love to book a cruise when they come out with an itinerary that interests me.  However, as discussed extensively, they continue to sail half full, with even fewer paying guests as there are many TAs & influencers aboard.  Something needs to change in this regard, yet it doesn't appear to be improving.

[HappyInVan]

35 minutes ago, mnocket said:

Overall, I've been favorably impressed by what I've read about EJ, and I'd love to book a cruise when they come out with an itinerary that interests me.  However, as discussed extensively, they continue to sail half full, with even fewer paying guests as there are many TAs & influencers aboard.  Something needs to change in this regard, yet it doesn't appear to be improving.

 

EJ is still a work in progress; after just one year. Typical of the difficulties and pitfalls of a new organization. At some point, the owners will have regrets on starting a new brand, instead of buying and juicing an existing brand.

 

I'm watching for the twists and turns. EJ may go up-market or down. It will offer new itineraries, and the new ships may be of a different size.

 

For example, HAL eliminated the Library; and restored it. Introduced Lincoln Center Stage, and dropped it.

 

The owners are rich and can afford patience. Yet, EJ's management will have to prove themselves quickly..

[Sthrngary]

16 hours ago, lelak said:

We are a few weeks back from 19 days onboard--Vancouver roundtrip to Hawaii, so lot of sea days.

One major caveat--the ship was less that half full (about 350 passengers), so some of our very

positive experiences may not be duplicated when the crew to passenger ratio isn't almost 3 to 1!

Also, my comments come from over 40 cruises on mainly luxury lines (Crystal, Silversea, Regent,

Seabourn (and Oceania which in a "Upper Suite" is in most respects a luxury line)).

 

In many respects this was a tale of two cruise lines.  First the positive:

1.  The crew could not have been friendlier or more responsive (except the front office staff, see below)

They knew our names almost immediately and responded to almost any request.  For example, at one

dinner we were chatting with the "restaurant manager" (one step below the overall F&B manager)

and remarked that the gelato choices in the gelateria were rather limited.  He asked what we'd like

and we told him coffee gelato.  He told us it would be available the next day and sure enough when

we asked at the gelateria they had made a big tub just for us (which we enoyed off and on for the

next 14 days).  

2.  The Emporium Marketplace is a superb concept, clearly better than the best buffets on the above

mentioned lines.  The freshly cooked pasta, sushi, and salad stations (yes they now have thousand

island dressing!) were particular favorites and there was no need to wait around while they were

preparing dishes--crew were happy to bring to our table (would this be true if the ship were full?)  We

even did something we never do on the other ships--had dinner at the "buffet" with three or four

nicely grilled lobster tails brought to us as main courses.

3.  The ship itself was gorgeous--everything was immaculate.  Four pools, an amazing number of

huge spa pools, and despite what others have noted, we never experienced a problem in finding

a way to lounge in the shade.

4.  In general, the food was excellent (a few negatives noted below) at all the restaurants No problem

in eating wherever or whenever (again others have noted this isn't true when ship is closer to full).

They handled my wife's gluten free request extremely well.  She is the family oenophile and did find

some drinkable wines on the included list, but more importantly was impressed by the quality on

the discounted premium list and how close the discounted prices were to internet pricing on the

two or three she purchased.  I haven't seen much said about this option and wonder whether it

was new to our cruise.  I've seen some controversy about Anthology.  We used our OBC for it

and found the meal superb--extremely close to the meal at Claude Le Tohic's O' restaurant

in SF--actually a bit cheaper for the almost identical meal on land and no $100 upcharge for

the wagyu beef.  I don't know if we would have spent the money if we didn't have the OBC, but

it definitely a culinary highlight.

5.  Our Cove Residence was very well laid out and very comfortable.  The bathroom is small (although

shower is huge) compared to other luxury lines and it is weird they have a heated floor but not

a heated mirror--so wiping with a washcloth needed if you want to see yourself after showering!

6.  Cruise director Michael a hoot especially at trivia which he converted into a personal cabaret show.

(He is moving to Explora 2 soon).

7.  We enjoyed the two resident singers and went to all their shows.  Sight  lines in the show room

excellent--no pillars, etc.

8.  Best internet I've every seen (and I'm a computer scientist) at sea.  Download speed mostly 

100 mps and upload close to that.  Better than at our location at home.  Easy to stream anything

and no blockage of sites.  The fact that were technically in the US the entire trip at sea helped eliminate

the need for using any  VPN almost the entire trip.

 

Minor negatives:

1.  No production shows (this could be anything from irrelevant to a major negative depending on personal taste).

2.  All fixed menus (some minor variants day to day).  However, halfway through the cruise they added five

additional main courses to both Fil Rouge and Med Yacht Club, so perhaps they were listening to comments for

such a long cruise.

3.  We're from N. Cal. so Asian food snobs.  Sakura was a mixed bag.  Huge variety of sushi of all types and

excellent quality.  Lots of excellent appetizers (although I'd suggest asking for the lobster and soft shell

crab rolls without the very spicy mayo or other sauce as it drowns out the delicate shellfish flavor).  Main courses

were not so good--salmon very overcooked/dry, Pad Thai tasty but nothing close to actual Pad Thai--laughably

wrong noodles and missing the characterisic tamarind flavor entirely, curry almost devoid of spice.  At a second

visit they cooked the salmon properly, added a decent amount of spice to the curry, and gave me a separate

bowl of tamrind sauce to add to the still wrong noodles for the Pad Thai (but there was lots of lobster!)

Two big misses they really should fix:  1.  no tea menu or asian tea variety, 2.  only one sake' available.  Both

Oceania and Regent do this much better in their Pan Asian restaurants.

 

Major negatives:

1.  As noted by myself and others before on CC, by far the worst website not just of any cruise line,

but any customer facing company.  In all our previous cruises I never used our TA for simple tasks

like restaurant reservations.  I analyze websites as part of my work and in just a brief review of

Explora's I found over a dozen serious to fatal problems in any other case would cause the website

to be taken down for repair and another beta test (if they even did one in the first place).

2.  While the internet was superb, the onboard IT infrastructure was not.  The onscreen menu

had several significant flaws--for example the tab for showing  one's onboard account didn't work.

3.  While the majority of the crew was superb and in fact both friendly and responsive, that did not

carry over to the financial management staff.  As noted above, you couldn't see your onboard

account on your room TV and when we got a printed statement it was the most confusing

balance sheeet I've ever seen.  With three days to go we finally figured out we were missing half

of our onboard credit from Virtuoso and they refused to fix it without "documentation" which

because of the non-functional website we only had the email accounting from our TA.  This finally

got fixed post cruise by our hardworking TA, but you would think both the onboard staff and the

head office would know what their deal was with the huge Virtuoso consortium.  No big deal

except for the early morning calls from the front desk repeatedly asking for documentation,

although we did end up leaving about 40 Euros unused because of the foul-up.

 

A few tips:

1.  Believe it or not, unlike on all the other above-mentioned lines, you actually can

(in some cabins easy, in others requires some nimble fingers) attach an HDMI

table to the TV and display whats on your laptop (so we watched on a large screen

our streaming services included what we recorded on YouTube TV).  On the

onscreen menu go to "Your Home at Sea" and "Connections" then the far right

choice of "HDMI," the down to "Confirm" (or something like that).  Before you

do that, connect your HDMI cable to HDMI1 on the rightside back of the TV.

This is easy if you have a room where the living room TV is on a swing out

mount like ours was, trickier if it's on a fixed wall mount like our friend's cabin

was.  That required someone with smaller fingers than find getting the HDMI

cable into the socket--depending on the room lighting you might need another

person holding a cellphone flashlight so the nimble fingered person can see

the socket.  Since Explora does provide this menu option they really ought to

either have an HDMI port on the USB area next to the TV, or have an HDMI

cable already attached to the TV port for your use.

2.  This has already been noted, but it did work for us.  If you have a Residence,

the champagne in the room is the cheap complimentary stuff served throughout the ship.

However, if you ask your butler nicely for the promised 2013 Dom Perignon it

did magically appear in our refrigerator a couple days later.

3.  If you want something, ask for it.  This seemed to work almost as well as on

Crystal (at least the Old Crystal, we haven't tried new Crystal yet).

 

Bottom line:  we would definitely book Explora again, even given the additional

strain on our TA, most likely on a 14+ day voyage where occupancy was likely

nowhere near capacity if they have any of those again.  I think we've learned how

to "navigate" the line appropriately!

 

@lelak Now this is what I am talking about.  GREAT job.  Really.  Super helpful.

 

Cruise well and enjoy every moment.

[lelak]

In response to mnocket, we actually didn't notice many TA's or influencers onboard

our cruise, probably because of the length of it. 

 

There is a fundamental mismatch, imho, in their desire to have a "younger" affluent crowd than the competition and their blindness to the need for a functional website.  The shame is that (and I've told their US sales management this on an extensive zoom meeting) it wouldn't take more than a week of effort by a competent IT team to fix the vast majority of the problems.

 

 

[Host Jazzbeau]

1 hour ago, lelak said:

their blindness to the need for a functional website.  The shame is that (and I've told their US sales management this on an extensive zoom meeting) it wouldn't take more than a week of effort by a competent IT team to fix the vast majority of the problems.

Explora uses Versonix Seaware.  They don't have the ability to bring in their own IT team to solve these problems – and every other new Seaware customer has similar website functionality problems.  Azamara's problems took forever to get up to 'decent' and still aren't fully fixed.  Windstar has been down for a month now from the latest 'upgrade.'  I don't know what the solution could be for Explora, but it doesn't involve staying with Seaware.

[mnocket]

26 minutes ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

Explora uses Versonix Seaware.  They don't have the ability to bring in their own IT team to solve these problems – and every other new Seaware customer has similar website functionality problems.  Azamara's problems took forever to get up to 'decent' and still aren't fully fixed.  Windstar has been down for a month now from the latest 'upgrade.'  I don't know what the solution could be for Explora, but it doesn't involve staying with Seaware.

There are probably some exceptions, but I'm unaware of any company that has outsourced its IT activities and had quality go up.

[WanderingTravels]

1 hour ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

Explora uses Versonix Seaware.  They don't have the ability to bring in their own IT team to solve these problems – and every other new Seaware customer has similar website functionality problems.  Azamara's problems took forever to get up to 'decent' and still aren't fully fixed.  Windstar has been down for a month now from the latest 'upgrade.'  I don't know what the solution could be for Explora, but it doesn't involve staying with Seaware.

 

Versonix Seaware is a reservation system, not a website.  A website would be built by an internal IT team or an outside vendor and then is coded to communicate with the reservation system for prices and availability.  In situations like this the problems usually occur when the company fails to scope out the project sufficiently and doesn't dedicate enough resources (particularly time, money and knowledge) to complete the project properly.  I've seen it countless times at companies, never fails.

[Host Jazzbeau]

39 minutes ago, WanderingTravels said:

 

Versonix Seaware is a reservation system, not a website.  A website would be built by an internal IT team or an outside vendor and then is coded to communicate with the reservation system for prices and availability.  In situations like this the problems usually occur when the company fails to scope out the project sufficiently and doesn't dedicate enough resources (particularly time, money and knowledge) to complete the project properly.  I've seen it countless times at companies, never fails.

When I see a pattern [all new Seaware customers have terrible websites] I connect the dots...

[WanderingTravels]

35 minutes ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

When I see a pattern [all new Seaware customers have terrible websites] I connect the dots...

You’ve left the dots on the right side of the page out of your calculation.  Your a cruise line with a website that is connected to a reservation system.  When you launch a new reservation system you have to rebuild your website to connect to the new system.   If you were correct, that the reservation system is at fault, then you would not only be able to use the website but also the reservation system, which is not the case.  Clients are able to make cruise reservations and even book shore excursions, provided they call.  Therefore the issue is the website.   There are many companies that use Seaware (NCL, Disney, AMA) and they don’t have problems.  Lindblad launched Seaware last year and we didn’t hear of any problems.   
 

https://www.travelagentcentral.com/cruises/lindblad-expeditions-announces-expedition-360-advisor-program

Edited June 10 by WanderingTravels

[Sthrngary]

Normally this kind of topic is way to technical for me to comment.  However, I just spent two weeks going back and forth with the Guest Support in Europe simply to enroll me on the website so I could look at my booking.  It seems, Explora Journeys has good taste.  They did not like my main email account.  As Rodney Dangerfield said, "Respect, I don't get no respect at all."  

 

I gave up and then I tried my google email.  BINGO.  The corporate office had to combine two accounts.  I had no idea I had two accounts, how lucky am I.  I could then make a password and see my account.  UNTIL today when my password did not work nor did the "Password Reset".  I also tried to look at a specific cruise and the screen went to an error message every time I tried. 

 

My point in writing this.  My career which is long over was all about understanding the luxury buyer's motivations, needs and wants.  Interesting study for sure.  To a luxury client, the debate on why this website is "kind of bad" and "not client friendly" makes no difference.  Luxury buyers just want it to work and when it does not, it is a poor reflection on the brand.  The luxury brand category comes with premium prices and the client expectations are noticeable higher. I am sure this will get fixed in the future.  As we all know, it is a Third World Problem for sure.  Still, a tad bit disappointing. 

 

Cruise well and enjoy every moment. 

[lelak]

I've been a reviewer and creator of websites for both private industry and the gov't since

there were websites.  As stated above Seaware is the back end system the website talks

to.  I don't know enough about it to evaluate how bad it is.  However, all the user facing

errors (and there are well over a dozen) have little or nothing to do with Seaware.  Some

are actually laughable (hearing that my flight arrival time had to be before my flight

departure time for example).  This is a human problem much more than a computer one.

There is no excuse for releasing the website without proper beta testing.  In the corporate

world I would have fired the CIO for the embarrassment it caused the company.  In the gov't

world where I couldn't fire the person he/she would have been reassigned to Anchorage 🙂

 

[Hotel CA]

On 6/10/2024 at 5:52 PM, WanderingTravels said:

You’ve left the dots on the right side of the page out of your calculation.  Your a cruise line with a website that is connected to a reservation system.  When you launch a new reservation system you have to rebuild your website to connect to the new system.   If you were correct, that the reservation system is at fault, then you would not only be able to use the website but also the reservation system, which is not the case.  Clients are able to make cruise reservations and even book shore excursions, provided they call.  Therefore the issue is the website.   There are many companies that use Seaware (NCL, Disney, AMA) and they don’t have problems.  Lindblad launched Seaware last year and we didn’t hear of any problems.   
 

https://www.travelagentcentral.com/cruises/lindblad-expeditions-announces-expedition-360-advisor-program

a little QA testing wouldnt hurt and maybe run one of the tools that uncovers broken links, bad pages, etc to see what you need to fix.......