Our 7 Day Alaskan Cruise review: The entire cruise experience

On September 17th, 2023, my husband and I boarded the Celebrity Eclipse for a 7 day cruise from Vancouver, B.C. return. We were celebrating our 53rd anniversary and my husband's 75th birthday. The embarkation process in Vancouver was a chaotic mess with 4 ships embarking and disembarking at the same time, took us almost 2 hours to board our ship through the maze of passengers and crew personnel. We went directly to our room, met our concierge and dropped off our carry on bags and proceeded to the complimentary luncheon. The luncheon was a disappointment, I could not slice into my chicken breast it was so tough, my husband has the beef, so we shared his meal. We then went for a drink to kill time while our room was being prepared for us. First, we have to say that the personnel on board the ship were excellent in every way and tried to keep us extremely happy, from our room steward to our dinner waiter, wine steward and assistant waiter. The maitre d' was also very charming and personable. The dinner I ordered with the lobster tail at an extra cost which I didnt mind paying for until I saw the size of the lobster tail, if it was a 3 ounces, I would be surprised and it tasted a bit off, but I ate it without complaint. The next day we ordered breakfast in the room and I starting feeling ill shortly thereafter, I had diarrhea and my stomach felt queezy. The whole day everytime I ate, I ended up in the bathroom. By Tuesday, the diarrhea was still bad. On Wednesday it was not letting up so I went to the infirmary to get some pills, they took a covid test which showed negative, gave me the anti diarrhea medication and then quarantined me to my room for 24 hours even though I showed no other signs or symptons of any illness. I was not pleased. The next day I was much better as the pills did help. The Wednesday, the diningroom staff went over and above and sent my husband back to our room with my dinner. We have been on many different cruise lines and never before have we seen the menu in the main diningroom so limited in choices. The same appetizers and entrees, save one to two, were the same each day. The food was not the quality you would expect on a 5 star ship, my husband I were both disappointed. On Friday night, my husband and I started to feel ill again with a sore throat, by Saturday, his 75th birthday, we were both not feeling well, and by Sunday, we were so looking forward to getting off the ship and returning home. Once home, we did a Covid test and we both tested positive for Covid. We were so sick we spent the next 24 hours in bed. The following day I sat down and cancelled the cruise we had booked with Celebrity for September 2024 on the same ship doing the New England/Canada route. This caused us to lose our deposit of $960.00 when we booked this cruise in February 2023.

On the Saturday while onboard the ship, I received a delivery to our room of a letter from customer service with a $200.00 Future Cruise Certificate as a gesture of goodwill due to having to quarantine me on the Wednesday. Of course this goodwill gesture will never be redeemed as we are so disappointed with Celebrity cruises.

We believe as a good will gesture Celebrity should, at the very least, refund our deposit of the $960.00 that we paid to book the New England/Canada cruise, for had we known what was awaiting us, we would never have booked the 2nd cruise after going on the Alaskan Cruise.

We did not realize that none of the mask protocols were in place for social distancing anywhere on the ship and more than one occasion we were crammed into elevators with passengers wearing no masks. We were very uncomfortable with this, but no one seemed to care and let me tell you there were plenty of people coughing, sneezing and not covering their mouths in the diningrooms, and public gathering places. We felt very isolated in respect of the health protocols being followed on ship. Yet when we watched the videos prior to our cruise they all showed staff and passengers wearing masks. That was not the case on our ship, it was perfectly acceptable not to wear a mask.