We booked the Azamara Quest cruise from Sydney to Bali sailing on 13th February 2016 way back in 2014. The itinerary looked fabulous and we had been advised that as cruise virgins we should go high end. This looked to be perfect. However, we were then told by seriously experienced cruisers that if we wanted to enjoy luxury cruising without the price tag we should try Celebrity, which we did in 2015. Perhaps we shouldn't have done that because it was obvious almost immediately that Celebrity gave us twice as much as Azamara for approximately half the price.

My first bug bear is that you cannot call a cruise ship luxury if the shower has a curtain! I hate fighting shower curtains. And I am not particularly large so heaven knows how passengers of a more generous shape coped at all. The staterooms were small but quite well fitted, it was the shower curtain that drove me crazy.

Second issue was the farce surrounding the inclusive drinks. The ridiculous offering of one white wine and one red wine per day was lucicrous. The fact that the wines were very poor quality compounded the problem. Very, very disappointing. There are only three "complimentary" (a misnomer if ever there was one - you should see my invoice for this cruise) beers, two of which were from Budweiser, so the choice was very poor indeed. There were no brandies amongst the spirits, so unless we opted to pay, we couldn't enjoy a brandy after dinner. Considering most high end cruise lines include at least a sparkling wine in the range of inclusive drinks I feel Azamara is sadly lacking. Read more