To put things into perspective I never wanted to cruise, having some pre-conceptions, not all of them positive. Overall my expectations - positive and negative - were achieved and in one or two areas, considerably exceeded - positively! My wife always wanted to try cruising because she knew she would be well looked after and pampered; her only reservation was possible sea sickness. But she had a BIG birthday coming and we both wanted to see the Antarctic - so, to start from the beginning:

Booking: Never did we find the Celebrity website user-friendly, constantly having to "go back out and come back in". Never did our registered sign-on work. Much of the site's terminology was ambiguous so we had to several times refer to our booking agent to get clarification on some important points. For such a big company we found the quality of website surprisingly bad - or is the ambiguity on purpose?

Boarding at Buenos Aires: After a 14 hour non-stop flight from London and a perfectly awful experience of getting out of Buenos Aires airport (two and a half hours of bedlam with hardly any airport or customs staff to be seen), we were not in a mood for problems getting onto the ship. Bad luck - another two hours of totally NO direction or help being given, because hardly any Celebrity or Port staff were to be seen. Even though we had paid for so-called priority booking, boarding, baggage delivery etc, nothing remotely like these things happened until in my typically fuming self, I just barged through the crowd, presented our papers to a harrassed looking Celebrity individual and with a death threat in my eyes we got through! Presumably, they were glad to get rid of us, but the ship still was somewhat late leaving because of the crowded nature of getting everyone aboard. Such an experience should NOT be part of such a holiday. That being said, disembarkation and re-boarding was a trial each time, but to be fair it is difficult to see how differently it could be handled, except by more staff and exit/entry points. Read more