Celebrity Millennium Review

Southbound Alaska One Couple/ in a 2-Room Family Ocean View with Balcony Cabin

Review for Alaska Cruise on Celebrity Millennium
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CharlieCharlieCharlie
10+ Cruises • Age 60s

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Sail Date: Aug 2017
Cabin: Family Ocean View with Balcony

First of all Alaska is a beautiful state to visit! The Millennium is a very nice ship to sail. Overall we had a wonderful cruise.

This is the first review I have ever written, so it might be a little too haphazardly written and I might have left out some things and definitely have written more than I intended. I hesitated giving our experiences on this ship and this cruise a review of 4, but it isn't a 3 either, so maybe a 4 minus overall. I think our rating opinion of this is partially because of experiences on the larger more elaborate Celebrity S-class ships, as well as experiences on other cruise lines.

We spent time on a very small ship in Alaska a couple of years ago August of 2015 enjoying up close and personal south eastern Alaskan culture, wildlife, glaciers and land. We loved it and wanted to explore Alaska further north, then take a more luxurious cruise south from the Anchorage area to end in Vancouver. When a special price advertisement from Celebrity arrived via email, the research led us to choose to take a cruise go to Alaska again in August of 2017.

Cabin Review

Family Ocean View with Balcony

Cabin FV

I might suggest a 3+ or a 4- for our cabin, with exceptions. The balcony of our Family Ocean View Balcony starboard corner aft cabin # 7202 is AMAZINGLY SPACIOUS, as is the 2 room cabin itself. On the balcony there is a large round wooden dining table with 4 adjustable for a slight reclining chairs for sitting. There are 3 reclining lounge chairs - none padded, but comfortable, along with a small round patio style side table. Our room steward provided us with blankets and large pool towels. The starboard side has open steel rails, part of the deck from the huge suite below sticks out a bit all around, although not an obstruction at all, you don't look directly down, but out to the ocean. The back of the deck wall is mostly solid steel, but a small part of that wall also has one clear glass panel for viewing directly out to the ocean. About 1/4 of the deck is steel covered from the deck above, which is fabulous for rain (we needed it for this Alaskan cruise) or sun protection, and there are also canvas covers for another portion of the deck. Because of the large amount of sporadic rain, we did not sit outside for long amounts of time, but did spend some time out there several times every day, and it was absolutely amazing for watching whales and other wild life as well as the fabulous Hubbard Glacier. The deck is spectacular, I could only imagine it being even better with a hot tub.

The bathroom is relatively TINY with a small sink, narrow counter, and an under counter cabinet area. The (always clean) curtained shower is small, but decent sized for the size of the bathroom itself. Even though the bathroom and shower floor tile grout is somewhat stained, dingy and grayish, with some rust in the corners, but was definitely kept as clean as it could be by our room steward. We had toilet flushing trouble on one day, but it was promptly repaired. Unfortunately on a couple of occasions we noticed a bit of a sewer like odor in the room's private hallway as well as in the main hallway; thankfully it wasn't a constant.

The two lockable doors for this cabin are in a private entry hall to this cabin. It is especially handy if you have large suitcases that can't fit under the bed (The same suitcases have stored under the bed on our other cruises except for the Reflection Signature Suite.)

The definitely not super luxury, but clean large cabin has orange brown patterned carpet in both rooms. Each of the 2 double closets for hanging items have plenty of hangers in them, plus the single door cabinet has 7 drawers and 3 shelves one has the lockable safe and one has the life vests. There is also a hair dryer that can be used in the US 110v outlet by the desk.

There is a flat screen TV in each room of this cabin (never figured out how to make either interactive so I went to the guest relations desk for a copy of my ship account to check non refundable shipboard credit, etc.), also there is a room length desk with a long marbled counter top - full mirror across the top half across the room + cabinets below and one desk chair. On the wall in the corner of the desk are is a set of 2 US and + 1 Euro outlet + a computer jack. The main bedroom twins/queen bed is comfortable (as ships go) with comfy pillows, with two 2-drawer night stands with a small lamp (rusted bases). A wood/glass pane sliding door separates the two rooms. Room 2, next to the balcony slider door has 2 very well used off white leather-like couch and love seat which are double fold-out beds (we didn't use these as beds.) Two 2-drawer night stands, one with a lamp (rusty base), a counter with small flat screen with cupboards beneath, and an oval glass top coffee table are also in this room. Each room had its own temperature control and it worked well for each room. There was a black out curtain across the sliding glass door to the balcony. While not new looking, it did its job well.

Our cabin steward, Ruel, was superb, he kept everything clean and comfortable for us, he brought a mattress topper for the bed then kindly took it away when we decided we didn't want it, he brought pool towels blankets for our balcony chairs. He iced our champagne and brought champagne glasses to set up for a small get cabin crawl/pirate poker cabin tour. We tipped him well, we think he deserved it.

While a little bit dated, we enjoyed the size, comfort and cleanliness of our cabin's rooms. The lighting could be improved, but it was sufficient. There are no small extras such as cotton balls, or qtips as far as toiletries are concerned, but there was bar soap, nicely scented shampoo, conditioner, shower gel and hand lotion. I usually bring and use my own anyway. The towels were fluffy enough and the sheets as soft and smooth as any other cruise ship or hotel sheets (not too bad, but not like home.)

There was just one main difficulty for this cabin, THE WALLS ARE PAPER THIN! We could hear LOUD talking and even make out the specific words and sentences from what was possibly just normal voice level conversations) and the worst of it was super unbelievably LOUD SNORING ALL NIGHT long. The walls were so thin and the noise so bad, I had to sleep with noise canceling headphones or I could not sleep at all. Even earplugs did not help. I don't know if is the same for all of the cabins on this ship. Having been on 10 different ships and many other cruises (several of them B2B and yearly repeats) we have not experienced ship cabins with this much noise transfer between rooms. The people next door were nice to say hello, and enjoy a brief conversation, plus we knew the paper thin walls were not their fault. We decided on this 7 night cruise that we enjoyed the two rooms in the cabin and the super large balcony to be worth wearing the noise cancelling headphones for sleeping. The noise was loud but not as significant in the room with the couches but they were not too comfortable for sleeping.

We did have the opportunity to view several cabins, and they were each nice and similar to the main part of our cabin, definitely much smaller than this two room family ocean view balcony. If you are on an M Class ship and get the opportunity to have one of the corner aft balcony cabins, it seems they are some of the very best ones to have! There are youtube videos and pictures available, so I didn't post anything here. We toured the exact cabin on the port side of deck 7, and it looked just like ours.

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