Celebrity Equinox review. 9/4/2017 sailing “The Hurricane Irma Cruise”
We’re 51 years old, married 21 years. For cuisine, I eat everything and my wife is a vegetarian. This was our 9th cruise and third on Celebrity, all three have been on the Solstice Class ships.
As you read through this you might think some areas quite negative, but you’re paying good money to go on your cruise so I like to give a true sense of what everything was like for us. Honestly it’s very VERY difficult to have a “bad cruise” because after all, you’re on a cruise ship being pampered day and night by the crew. The main difference between cruises is the level of service from the crew and the quality of the food as you compare ships.
Our stateroom was 1243, a Concierge level Stateroom on the Port side on the backside of the kick-out near the aft elevators. So to look forward we had to look around the cabin to our right, but we had a clear view looking straight out and aft. We booked the cruise through a warehouse membership site and chose the classic drink package and extra shipboard credits for our 2 incentivized options while booking.
The bathroom layout in the Solstice Class ships is among the most efficient of any cruise line. The space allows plenty of room to stand with the placement of the shower and toilet. There are plenty of cabinets and shelf space and even the trash can is tucked away. The shower controls are really nice with the water pressure and hot/cold controls separated so if you need to turn off the water during your shower, it comes right back on at the same temperature as when you turned it off. The shower is small, but functional and includes sliding glass doors so you don’t have to worry about shower curtains sticking to you during a shower.
Inside the cabin there is a good sized closet, but the dresser / drawer space is somewhat limited, just three of them. So we learned a trick from a fellow Celebrity traveler by purchasing 12” x 12” collapsible cubes that we place in the cabinet above the bed. This cabinet can easily hold 8 of these cubes and we’ll put our underwear, socks, t-shirts and other stuff in there. Another great tip is to get a wall hanging, canvas shoe rack and hang that on the bathroom door. We’ve used that for most every cruise we’ve been on.
We usually try to book an aft cabin because we enjoy the vibrations from the engines which helps us sleep, but in this case, we did book more mid-ship, right next to the aft elevators. We were concerned about foot traffic and late night noise from folks coming off the elevator, but we did not experience any issues during the 11 days.
As for the Concierge Level perks, the best perk was having access to the concierge herself, Dana. Booking excursions, dinners, answering questions, anything we needed, we just went to her. Usually without a wait. I will say the final day at sea, expect a long wait if you have questions for her.
The afternoon snacks were a bit disappointing and we generally did not eat them. Either they had been sitting in the room too long (like the shrimp) or just generally not something exciting.
The pillow menu was not all that great, the different types of pillows are simply not all that much different.
But the preferred access to and from the ship was great and again, having access directly to Dana to handle requests was worth the cost of the Concierge Level alone.
This was our first port of call and as it was a last minute change, we didn’t make any excursion plans. We opted to walk across the pontoon bridge to the incredibly colorful shopping and restaurant district. One of the best features of Curacao is the free wifi throughout the town. Even the crew talked about it. Once we crossed the bridge we had wifi the entire day.
The pontoon bridge is a real bridge, it’s not some wobbly wooden bridge suspending on a few pontoons. Anyone can walk across it and getting a wheelchair or scooter across should be no problem. We were in port for a long day, 8am - 8pm so grabbed breakfast at the cutest little cafe on a side street. No clue the name or what street, but the three women setting up the place were all chatting and laughing so we were drawn to the place. I had a decent egg sandwich and cappuccino and my wife just went with a bagel. Simple meal, but a pleasant time chatting with the three women about the island and living there.
There are a lot of fun shops that go far beyond the typical port of call shopping and we did not get any pressure from folks to come in and buy or get approached by people try to get us to buy stuff. It was a very pleasant and enjoyable port to explore.