We recently completed our first cruise on Celebrity Eclipse in a Royal Suite on the South America Holiday cruise. This will be a long and detailed review for those who might be curious about how RCCL suite experience compare to Celebrity. We are a couple with an elementary school aged child and have cruised on Disney, Princess and Royal Caribbean suites in the past. We had high expectations from the Celebrity suite experience based on online reviews. Our most recent cruise prior to Eclipse was in a Star class suite on RCCL Ovation of the Seas where we had fabulous service and loved our Genie.

Our cruise journey started on the wrong foot with a very poor embarkation experience. We arrived at the Buenos Aires port around 4 pm and was greeted by port employee who checked in our luggage. Then she told us to go upstairs in the port building to the priority check in line for suite guests. However, when we went upstairs, we couldn’t see any line marked as the priority line and the employee in charge there told us we needed to go through the main line which was very long. Finally after waiting in the main line for what seemed like forever with, we bit the bullet and made an expensive international call to the Celebrity Shoreside concierge in Miami and was able to expedite our embarkation. After all this embarkation hassle, we were relieved to be finally on board but our relief was short lived. When we got to our room, we found that one of our hard shell suitcases was badly cracked during delivery. Our butler and the onboard concierge said the suitcase could be fixed on board but our suitcase came back with what appeared to be a superficial hot glue application which didn’t look sturdy. When we expressed concern that the suitcase fix was unlikely to hold together on the way back, our concierge offered to either give us $50 credit or send a new suitcase. We didn’t want to waste our port days shopping for a new suitcase so we asked for their replacement which turned out to be a fairly cheap, soft sided suitcase. On RCCL, we did not experience any of these embarkation issues.

On the service front, the Luminae and other restaurant employees were wonderful but we were deeply disappointed with our butler. Though he did a decent job keeping the cabin tidy and clean, he was very poor at other aspects of his job. He didn’t bring us evening appetizers unless we asked for them and one time when we asked for tea sandwiches to be delivered he told us “ you can also get them at Michael’s yourself”. Another time when he was late delivering our room service breakfast on a port day where we had an early tour, he said he had too many room service orders and didn’t seem apologetic. In addition, we have requested a cake to be delivered to our room via shoreside concierge on New Year’s Eve which never showed up. Overall the butler service fell very short of the Genie service we received on Royal Caribbean. Read more