I’ve just disembarked a cruise on one of the most exciting and expensive cruise ships in the world where I saw and did things that I didn’t know were possible at sea.
The ship I was sailing on was Celebrity Edge built in 2018 and she is home to the world's first floating restaurant platform that rises up 12 decks on the side of the cruise ship.
Want to find out what it's like on a 'cheap' alternative I mentioned in this video: https://youtu.be/USQfF5SCm1o Considering a family-focused alternative, check out my review of the Norwegian Prima here: https://youtu.be/qN4WPbpo6YI Prefer a British cruise line, I spent a week cruising with Fred Olsen here: https://youtu.be/10oaJ10kdAo
For years I’ve cruised with the budget and mainstream cruise lines but a cruise on Celebrity Edge has always been just out of reach, as much as I wanted to do it. When I saw that Celebrity had an offer that meant that flights would only be £1, I decided that it would be a good time to give it a go. I’ve wanted to take my Mum on a cruise for a while and this seemed like the perfect opportunity for a quality mother-and-daughter adventure, or so I hoped.
Before this cruise I didn’t know what to expect from Celebrity or from the ship, I’d heard great things about the food and the entertainment but I’m pretty sure that this is the most expensive cruise that I’ve ever paid for. I didn’t know how it could realistically be worth the price that I paid and like with any cruise, alongside the great reviews there were also plenty of bad reviews with some describing Edge as ‘disappointing’ and a ‘major fail’.
We embarked the ship in Barcelona and set sail for a 7 night Mediterranean cruise. My cruise actually started off in a more stressful way than I’d have liked when we were directed into the airports car park to pick up our transfer bus, my cruise had the transfers included. We couldn’t see the bus anywhere and couldn’t get back into the airport to ask where we were meant to be going because everything was one way, we were just faced with escalators that were going the wrong way and I didn’t fancy running the wrong way up one of those. It was hot and after about 15 minutes of frantically running from bus to bus I was thinking that we would just have to give up and get a taxi and hope that our bags would be taken to the ship.
All of a sudden we saw our bags on a trolley across the car park, I was so happy to see them. We followed them to the bus and were able to ask the person working there where we were meant to be. It was not the straightforward start that I was hoping for but I was sure that the cruise would be worth it. I’d just be arriving a little more flustered than planned!
The stressful transfer situation was more than made up for when we managed to check in for the cruise in about 20 seconds. Pre-cruise we had already taken our security photos, filled out the health declaration and added our credit card to our account so when we arrived at the port, all we had to do was show this QR code which was checked against our passports.
I’ve embarked on cruises in the past where it's taken 2 or 3 hours, so checking in in 20 seconds was pretty incredible. I hoped that this was a sign of things to come.
As soon as we stepped onboard we were directed towards our muster station which happened to be the theatre. It’s a legal requirement that on all cruises all guests have to complete a safety drill and this was once again made very easy because we’d already watched the safety videos on the app, all we had to do was go to check in at the place where we would muster in case of an emergency.
