Having sailed with Thomson fairly recently on both Celebration and Destiny (and also on 'Topaz' some time ago), and generally been very happy with the service and standards, my wife and I, together two other couples were very apprehensive as to what was in store for us after reading the many appalling reviews of Dream's first cruise. So much so, that I emailed Thomson four days before we left to get reassurances that the main areas of concern would be addressed before we sailed. As this email was not responded to or even acknowledged after 2 days, I re-sent it. This time it was acknowledged, but all it said was that my email was being forwarded to the appropriate team to reply. To-date, I still haven't had a response, which I think is particularly poor for Thomson's customer communications department.

Now that we've spent a week on the ship on its first Mediterranean Explorer cruise (4 to 11 May 2010), I'm happy to report that the vast majority of our concerns were unfounded, and in terms of value-for-money it would be hard to beat this cruise. OK, the Dream is not one of the modern breed of mega cruise ships, but it is certainly a ship with a happy crew, good cabins, good food and excellent entertainment. It must be remembered that Dream entered service in 1986, and she is showing her age in places. We were surprised at the number of passengers who had been informed that Dream was a brand-new ship. Understandably they were somewhat disillusioned.

We were on Deck 5 and the cabin was quite spacious and in good decorative condition. The beds were very comfortable and the bedding and towels clean. In particular the bathroom area was an improvement over that on Destiny or Celebration, with the shower being a good size for a ship. There was plenty of hot water and the toilet flushing mechanism worked well. The cabin had one European style (round pin) electrical outlet, and one American style (flat pin) outlet. As always, the cabin stewardess kept the cabin spick and span, and was also highly creative in creating animals from the cabin towels. I understand all the cabins have been refurbished relatively recently by the previous owners (Costa Cruises). We experienced only one minor cabin problem (as did everybody else on the ship), which was the loss of water for one hour late one afternoon, which was due to emergency repairs. This lead to queues at the Customer Services desk, as lots of passengers were reporting the same problem (I can't think why they didn't put an announcement out over the Tannoy system). Read more