Celebrity Constellation Review 8/26/04 Baltics (long)

[Jeff Stieglitz]

You can see my review at

[url="http://groups.google.com/groups?th=4bbdaf3a8d45534b"]http://groups.google.com/groups?th=4bbdaf3a8d45534b[/url]


I wanted to post it here but it's too long to survive in one piece in the message boards, and the CruiseCritic cruise review section gave me an http:500 error.

Whew, I never thought I'd write too much for a computer to handle.

I'd enjoy hearing your comments.

[jimmy2x]

A really great review - I could almost picture the "eye candy".:D

[MSBYRDY]

Thanks Jeff, what a great review. We're considering this for next summer so it was wonderful to read.
Marilyn

[Nitemare]

Great stuff! One thing I wanted to post was about this:

[QUOTE]the attendant told me that they would mail postcards for $1.25 each, and if they were submitted more than an hour before departure they would bear the postmark of the current port. As it turns out, $1.25 was reasonable compared to the international postcard rates we found at some of the ports. [/QUOTE] We did this on the Norway cruise -- sent ourselves postcards from each port. Most of them arrived 2 weeks after we got home, all postmarked in Brugge (the last stop).

[missm]

Jeff - Great review! We were on the sailing just before yours and also used RO in St. Petersburg as well. We also had one of the "Elena's" as our guide - ours was a very pretty 2nd year law student who has been working as a guide for 8 years.

One comment I have about the disembarkation process in St. Pete... Celebrity has worked very, very hard to streamline this. The hotel manager of the Constellation finally had to resort to a 3-way call between him, Russian port authorities and Celebrity HQ in Miami to finally work out a clear, workable disembarkation policy for independent travelers like us. They deserve a lot of credit for this - previously the Russian port authority had been changing the rules with nearly every port visit. Our sailing was the first to benefit from these new procedures and our experience was identical to yours. We were ready for problems and experienced none whatsoever.

For those of you considering using RO next year - I can also vouch for the quality of their services. We felt that we received an excellent value for our money and saw much, much more than those who took ship's tours. One caveat, though, READ YOUR BILL CAREFULLY! I feel their practice of printing the bill with a 3% fee built in on the assumption that you will use a credit card is somewhat deceptive. We were also incorrectly billed for a boat ride which we had never discussed, nor was it on our itinerary. That item was removed as was the 3% credit card fee. Had we not known about this practice in advance, and were prepared to pay in cash, we might have just gone ahead and paid the inflated charge anyway. Nowhere on the bill is there a notation that this 3% fee has been factored into the bill total. Just a word to the wise!

This was a fabulous trip - I can highly recommend it.

MissM