Crystal Mahler Review

5.0 / 5.0
0 reviews

Great service, food, and ship

Review for Europe River Cruise on Crystal Mahler
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2SailingNomads
10+ Cruises • Age 60s

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Sail Date: Jul 2018
Cabin: Suite

After 15 cruises and over 300 days on Seabourn we decided to try a river cruise, so to be fair my opinion of this cruise is colored by my Seabourn ocean cruise experiences. A river cruise was something we had thought about for the past several years, and had enticed friends who never did any type of cruise to join us. After evaluating the various lines for a river cruise, Crystal seemed to have the best offerings in a lot of ways. The original itinerary was very interesting Budapest to Amsterdam, but due to low water levels it was changed to round trip Amsterdam, less than 2 weeks prior to the cruise - or at least that was when Crystal let us know. To their credit you could either cancel - as our friends did - and get a credit equal to what you paid or go on the changed itinerary and get a substantial future credit, which we took as the changed ports were not places we had been to. If you took the cruise, they would also cover up to $1000 of airfare per person, which worked out well since we had flights booked to Budapest.

We took advantage of the Crystal - included - airport to/from ship transfers on a comfortable coach.

Once we got to the ship, the service from start to finish was top notch. But I need to qualify this, the ship can hold 106 pax, we only had 44 due to the changed itinerary. We had a butler who basically was useless, canapes delivered to the room each afternoon, 1/2 the time after we had left to go to the bar for pre-dinner cocktails. Never offered to pack or unpack for us. Nice guy, but one less crew they need to pay, IMO.

Cabin Review

Suite

Cabin S3

Comfortable bed and pillows. Good sized shower. Storage was a bit tight. Housekeeping was efficient and personable.

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