I haven't talked much about this ship - the Celebrity Eclipse. In many ways it's very much your standard 'middle of the range' cruise ship, but there are a couple of things that I've found to be a little different - some good, some I'm not so sure about.
We purchased a drink package before we got on board - there are packages for alcoholic drinks but ours is what they call their premium non-alcoholic package. It probably hasn't saved us a huge amount of money but it has certainly been really convenient - we can get our fresh orange juice in the morning, decent coffees through the day, and any bottled water we want without going through all the rigmarole of signing for them. All of these are things you normally pay extra for but they're all covered by the drink package. No other cruise line we have been on has had a drinks package this good - mostly they only cover soft drinks and not the fresh fruit juice, bottled water and coffee that have been our main uses of this one.
Laundry has been a two-edged sword. Of course on the down side, like a number of other cruise lines, they don't have a self serve laundry. However, because we have sailed a few times with their sister company (Royal Caribbean) we're granted "Select" membership of their Captain's Club. This doesn't mean an awful lot, but one thing it did get us is two laundry bags of washing, washed and folded, for only $20 each. The normal cost would have been more like $95 each - it doesn't take too long for the price to build up when they're charging $2.50 to wash a pair of socks! I'm not saying this is the best thing - it would still be better if they had a self service laundry - but Royal Caribbean themselves don't have such an offer. The other normal laundry though - washing and ironing of our normal clothes - has cost us well over $200 for the two weeks. I'm looking forward to getting back to dry land and the English "launderettes".
As far as food goes - it's pretty much a standard cruise ship too. We have been eating breakfast and lunch in the buffet upstairs, where we can always find something nice. For dinner we have opted for fixed dining which means we sit with the same people each night - we wouldn't normally do this as we're both really quite shy when it comes to meeting new people and socialising for long periods of time - but it hasn't turned out too badly.
The food in the Dining Room though has been interesting. It's an american cruise line trying to do cuisine to please a mostly English passengers and it has been a bit hit and miss - there have been at least two nights where I have struggled to find anything I really want to eat. On the other hand, there have been some really nice meals.
There have also been some combinations of food that have just simply been odd - two weird examples:
- A dessert which was called a Toffee Pudding. This should be basically a cake with Toffee Sauce, and it was, except that the cake had some pineapple baked into it, and it was served with some sliced banana and topped with Rice Crispies - as in the breakfast cereal! It tasted nice, but it's the sort of combination you might expect three-year-old kid to suggest.
- A seafood bisque into which they had - deliberately - put some peas.
They also have a surprising understanding of 'rare' cooked steak and roast. In my experience, American cruise lines simply won't do rare meat - they think it's going to kill you and have warnings against it all over the menu, even here where they have agreed to do take orders for it (seriously! - I have been on cruises where they have refused to take an order for rare steak). However, they have gone a bit overboard - although I really like my meat rare, their idea of rare is just a little too rare for me, and everyone at the table has said the same thing at some time or another.
There are three specialty restaurants on the ship - Qsine (modern quisine, including ordering your food via iPads at each table), Murano (French), and the Tuscan Grill (seafood and steak with an Italian flavour).
The only way to avoid having to dress up for formal night but still get table service is to eat at one of these restaurants - the dress standard is smart casual all the time, even on formal nights. So, we went to the Tuscan Grill on the last formal night. The food was pretty good - the only thing slightly disappointing was Paul's ravioli appetiser which he said was a little chewy. I had calamari for appetiser - crumbed and deep fried. For my next course I had an "Italian Chop Chop Salad" - basically lots of salad greens, tomato, avocado etc etc all chopped up and tossed in a bowl. And for my main course I had a lobster pasta dish with alfredo sauce. This was one of the best meals I had on the ship - the servings were quite large, to the point where I couldn't face a dessert and just had a coffee. Definitely worth the $45 each cover charge. Oh, and the one thing no-one had mentioned - this restaurant on Deck 5, right at the back of the ship, and they have huge windows overlooking the sea. Our table was right in the middle at the window, so for the whole meal we had a beautiful view of the sea. Just lovely.
On the other hand, dinner on the last night was really disappointing. We were back in the main dining room, and they had what they called a Top Chef special, where all the meals that night were an attempt to recreate winning dishes from Master Chef or some such show. I think this was a really misguided idea and they really should know better - food that wins these shows does so because it contains unusual or unexpected flavours and that's not necessarily going to thrill people who are simply trying to eat dinner. Also, like it or not, the main galleys on these cruise ships are really just mass production kitchens and they aren't up for creating true gourmet meals. The bottom line was that we all felt that we had really limited choices which really gave a bit of a negative feeling to our last meal together.
And finally, someone should really tell them that 'mac and cheese' might be considered gourmet in the USA but it isn't in England or Australia. Or, probably anywhere else in the world either - to me it's a cheap meal that kids eat, or starving students. It regularly made an appearance as a side dish or as part of a meal, and it was really strange to see it on a menu where they were desperately trying to convince us that we were eating gourmet cooking!
Overall, it was a really different cruise to our usual experiences, mostly because there were so many port days as compared to sea days. So, when it was a sea day, we were almost always just recovering from the previous day or days and we didn't do an awful lot on board. For example, we didn't attend any of the 'information' lectures whereas we'd normally go to a few - or at least I would. Not saying this is a bad thing, just that it makes it really hard to compare with our other cruises. Celebrity is certainly now on my list of companies I'd cruise with, but I still think Princess is the best of them all.
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