Any SS aficionados been on Oceania??

[sw18]

Hi all, Hadn't planned on cruising again before next April on the Cloud From Dubai toi Alexandria, but considering a cheapie offer on Oceania in later this year.

Have any SS diehards been on Oceania & more specifically on Regatta & in a Penthouse suite on deck 8? Whats good? Whats bad? How do they compare? etc etc

 

Any info very much appreciated :) :) :)

[cruiseerf]

Oceania has quite a lot of Silversea employees working there now. Rumour has it 40% of the employees came from Silversea where they felt they were not being treated fairly or paid enough. I believe head of food and beverage from Silversea and head of sales are working there, not to mention so many of the serving staff. Enzo who used to be head of dining room service for Silversea now heads up the dining room service on ALL Oceania ships.....he was great on Silversea and must continue to be so on Oceania. Oceania reviews are excellent.......everybody says....a notch below Silversea but a close second and for 1/2 the price....I would say try it out but in one of their big suites as the regular cabins are tiny as the ships were converted from mass market cruiseline.

 

Good luck and enjoy!

[LOGHL]

We were requested (by the present head of hotel directors) formerly with SS

to please go on a cruise & let him know how we felt about the experience.

He knew that we were devotees of SS & would be honest in our assessment of Oceania. We were introduced to the maitre'd as special friends of "???"

so that our treatment was above the ordinary. Now that you are aware of the backround ..here is the story.

We were in the next to the top suite..we don't like being in the aft of the ship... It was satisfactory. The butler was nothing to write home about.Fruit in suite was not changed...he did nothing for us that in any way helped our cruise. Food, was very very good...service in the 2 restaurants was very very good( because we were personal friends of >>>>)????

The service in the buffet restaurant was terrible... dirty plates were not removed even when servers were standing nearby.

Entertainment venue was very poor....unless you went VERY early to get a front row seat, you couldn't see very well. The dress of the passengers was an embaressment. There is no formal dress, but many people dressed in an excessively casual way. When they had "smart casual" as the dress of the day, a number of folks wore T shirts, flip flops, & shorts. We only went on one tour & that was a disaster. Coach was LOADED..so they used the middle pull down seats.very uncomfortable....not like SS where they NEVER fill the coaches. When we got to the beach, I went to sit down on one of the beach chairs & was told (not asked ) to get up as we had the "other chairs" Our chairs had no pads were in the sun & we were not to move them.

By, the way when I sent this report to .......... I wrote it as I presented here...He had asked for the truth..... I have not heard from him since.

Oceania wants to be a 5 star line with a 2 star mentality.

Their prices are very low, that is why they keep getting passengers.I wonder how many repeats they get??

[cberge]

Oceania will never be SS no matter who they hire or what they try to do.They have a somewhat loyal group of devotees more for the price than the service as a lot of them do not know top line service,and I don't mean that to be a nasty comment.One of the biggest complaints of Oceania is that they nickel and dime you to death and their drink prices are very high.Cheap cruise fares or good service...as the saying goes "you get what you pay for."

[RJB]

Oceania has been doing a wonderful job with thier food and service. Just can't seem to do enough for you. Food is as good as any other cruise line we have been on, Including SS, Crystal and Radison (Regent). Have been in Penthouse Suites and Vista Suite. Would not go in regular cabins. Much too small. What they do off the ship, ie tours etc is not at all up to these other ships, but we have been arranging our own tours so no problem. We spent 24 days in a Vista Suite(800 square ft.) on the Nautice in Feb and Mar. so we had a long time to compare these things.Our butler was wonderful. Nothing was too much for him to do for us, including getting and packing boxs for us to ship home from China. We would go again as well as sail on SS in the future.

[meow!]

We have only been on one fourteen-day Oceania Mediterranean cruise and one seven-day Silver Shadow Mexican Riviera cruise, so we are not experts on either line. However, we also read a lot on the internet and pay attention to what we can observe.

 

Both Oceania and Silversea had very good food. Oceania seemed to offer a bit more in variety of sea food (for that particular voyage), but we were later told that we could pre-order many items the night before on Silversea if we so wished. The taste and quality on Oceania was better than all other mass market lines we had been on. Silversea food seemed a little more "refined" though the variety printed on the menu was less. Silversea did offer sevruga caviar and foie gras freely all the time, while Oceania only had caviar two nights of the two-week cruise.

 

The service on Oceania was jovial, staff members were friendly while fellow passengers were folksy. Perhaps the tipping policy gave some incentive to the staff to try hard (?) Silversea service was also very good, though a bit low-keyed. We never saw the cabin staff (unless we called them), but our cabin was well cleaned nearly immediately after we left it, as several times, it was cleaned within the hour or so when we just went up-deck to have our lunch. This convenience of not having to wait for your room to be cleaned before you could return to it was well appreciated. As we figured that Silversea guests were more upscale, being only ordinary cats, we mostly stayed to ourselves, unless someone else paid attention to us first. When that happened, those fellow passengers were quite nice.

 

Oceania has only a single-storeyed night-club styled entertainment lounge while Silver Shadow has a well tiered, multi-storeyed true (albeit small) theatre with full facilities. In this aspect, the "hard wares" were incomparable.

 

We had an ordinary balconied cabin on Oceania Regatta, that cabin was "standard fare", nearly identical to a "category 2" on Celebrity Mercury, for example. It was compact, functional and comfortable enough (for ordinary cats), but luxury was nowhere to be found. (Oceania bought existing ships belonging to the former Renaissance, and they couldn't do much to the hardware). Silver Shadow, on the other hand, had just about the best basic cabin at sea. Even the lowest "vista suite" was indeed a compact sized luxury hotel room, with more luxurious trappings than a standard room in an average five-star hotel on land. Its marine architects, Yran & Storbraaten of Oslo deseved a prize for designing such an elegant, efficient and well appointed cabin.

 

Oceania usually has very good itineraries, and this is one of their main attractions. It fills a niche market very well, the fact that its pricing managed to increase substantially over the last two years testifies to this.

 

Oceania is not cheap, roughly 40% more expensive than HAL or Celebrity, for example. Quite often, on a 40-50% discounted "silver sailing", when you take into account the free drinks and no tipping on Silversea, and the included airfare on Oceania (these two factors sometimes cancel out), the final bottom line between a "verandah suite" (295-345 sq.ft.) on Silversea and a "PH minisuite" (322 sq.ft.) on Oceania can be very close. In fact, if you look at the per diem "brochure price", the two lines are not far apart. The difference is in the fact that Oceania often has perpetual "2 for 1" while Silversea usually has much lower discounts than that.

 

Both lines are very good, and one should try both to get a variety of experiences. Hope this helps.

[sw18]

Thanks for the input folks......I'm going to go ahead and book it; I've an option on one of the midship penthouses for the crossing in November. Needless to say I'm keeping my deposit for my Cloud cruise next April :)