I Took Two Cruises on The Same Ship and They Were COMPLETELY Different

i've just disembarked a cruise on the celebrity silhouette this wasn't my first time cruising on the ship but this cruise was completely different to the first time i cruised on her it's honestly a bit difficult to think that this was the same ship and the same cruise line to celebrate the first sailing of the celebrity silhouette since the shutdown celebrity invited me along with journalists important people and even some celebrities to join them for a british isles cruise this meant that i got to do things that i would never normally do on a cruise and i got to go in places that i would never normally be allowed to go in through those do not enter doors i also had the weirdest dinner i've ever had on a cruise but more about that later celebrity have spent a whopping 75 million on this ship since i was first on board so i was obviously interested if i would notice the differences i know 75 million dollars sounds like a lot of money but cruise ships are quite expensive things to run so i didn't know if i would actually be able to notice the differences i was interested in the covered safety measures too but most importantly i was interested in getting back to eating the celebrity cruises food which is amazing i took my mum on this cruise who's never cruised with celebrity before so i was interested in what she would think of it my mum's heard me talking about celebrity for years now but it's very different to actually being on board i took my first cruise with celebrity in 2019 and i had heard amazing things about celebrity cruises food before this i'd never really been able to afford a celebrity cruise but i saw one that was three nights long it was over a weekend it was perfect and i was really interested in that celebrity difference that lots of celebrity fans have told me about for years the three night cruise i took went to amsterdam and back it was over a weekend so everybody on board was celebrating their birthdays other anniversaries and it was great but i just knew when i came back from that cruise i want to try a proper celebrity cruise i don't think that really counts which is probably why you haven't heard me talk about cruising with celebrity because i didn't really think i could base it off of that three night party cruise as good as it was it was a party cruise when you take a celebrity cruise at the moment you have to show a negative pcr test before you can get on board which meant that my kind of celebrity cruising journey started a few days before the cruise celebrity have partnered with a company called eurofins which means you can do tests at their centers for free you can do private tests and they're totally fine but if it doesn't come back in time you're kind of on your own whereas if you do it through the celebrity partner company i figure at least celebrity will be on my side there and chasing them up for me because we'd already done the check-in on our phones because we'd already done our tests the embarkation process was so unbelievably quick i took an msc cruise about a month ago and with msc you have to do a test at the port that kind of just slowed things down and embarkation took about an hour and a half which i really didn't think was too bad but this celebrity cruise i went from my car to the ship in 22 minutes very impressive considering that's going through security that's checking your covert test checking your vaccinations checking your passports checking your checked in and ready to go 22 minutes that's pretty good one of the best things about taking one of these first cruises is that nobody else is disembarking so as soon as you get on board you can go straight to your cabin i had a balcony cabin in the middle of the ship if you know me you'll know i'm normally in an inside cabin i'm normally in the worst locations on the ship so it was really nice to have not only a balcony but a central balcony the central location isn't something that i would pay extra for but i certainly enjoyed it when i was on this cruise it was really nice to come out of my room and think oh do i go forward or do i go backwards normally for me i'm right at the end so there's only one option to walk four miles that way to get to anything but it was it was nice i enjoyed it our balcony cabin was very spacious it was very comfortable it was quite similar to the cabins that they had before they haven't made huge changes because they really didn't need to our bathroom was absolutely massive it's bigger than i think almost any bathroom i've had on a cruise ship and we were very very comfortable in this cabin the cabin also has free room service which is something i don't normally do on a cruise but we had room service breakfast every single day of our cruise we were up early doing excursions doing tours and that room service it was amazing it was so good another thing that i liked about these cabins is that they all have kettles most cruise lines that are doing british isles cruises this summer are adding kettles to the cabin so people can make their own tea because they know how much we love tea here in britain and i loved that kettle the first thing we needed to do as you do on every cruise is the muster drill the master drill is a safety drill that has to be completed on the first day of your cruise and it tells you things like where to go in an emergency how to put on your life jacket traditionally you would all go together to a muster drill when i cruised on the celebrity silhouette before we all went to the theater we watched the videos we learned how to put on the life jackets but i'm happy to say that that really isn't a thing anymore all that we had to do was watch the safety information either on our phones or on the tv and then go to our muster station so that we would get a little sticker i have the little sticker here and this sticker is just proof that we went to the muster station that's all we needed it didn't take very long at all and i hope that this is a covered change that sticks around forever because it's so much better there are a couple of things on these celebrity ships that i think make them instantly recognizable as this type of celebrity ship the first one is that in the atrium there is a giant tree a giant tree a real tree that somebody has to water somebody has to look after i don't know really how they do that when it's so high up but i'm sure they have it worked out and rather them than me that sounds terrifying the second thing is that the celebrity silhouette has real graphs on the top i remember cruising on the substrate silhouette before i saw the grass i thought oh cool grass but i didn't really appreciate how tricky it is to get grass to grow on a cruise ship celebrity had to do a lot of work behind the scenes to find a type of grass that would be able to grow by the sea with the salty air i hadn't even thought about it before but they did a lot of work to find this perfect hybrid grass and there's two people on board who look after the lawn when i was on board it was the euro football games that were showing and they were showing on this big screen i'm pretty sure that this big screen is one of the things that they updated during the big refurbishment i'm going to be bringing you a full ship tour that shows what it used to look like and what it looks like now i think it's really cool to see them side by side so make sure you subscribe for that coming soon the football games were also shown in the theater and in various bars around the ship i'm personally not into football so we always decided to have our dinner at football time you could still hear the booze and the cheers you could work out who was winning but i much prefer to be eating than watching football another area that has had big changes since the big refurb is the sunset bar so at the back of the ship there used to be a bar at the back and then two pieces of grass that would go down the side they have changed these side areas into these amazing seating areas and i think this became one of my favorite places on the ship it was incredibly comfortable incredibly relaxing we would have a drink and we even have some sunshine on this cruise taking a british house cruise we were very lucky one of the problems i had with my first celebrity cruise is that it was really tricky to find a seat in any bar in any lounge admittedly i did take the party cruise but i'm still happy to see that celebrity have added a lot more seats into a lot of places a lot of the money that they spent the 75 million dollars seems to have been spent on extra seats which i think is good on my first celebrity silhouette cruise we found a few places where we could find seats that tended to be quiet we would spend a lot of time in this hideaway area which i thought was very cool and also in the library but even the library was not free of people enjoying their stag and hendus your british ism of the week is a stag and hendu this is what you guys in the us call a bachelor and bachelorette party quite far back in history male only and female only parties have been called stag and hen parties but it is what it is it is a stag or hindu here in the uk and i think australia probably is is with us on this one you normally are with the british isms during our cruise there were just under a thousand passengers on board and almost as many crew the celebrity silhouette can hold almost 3 000 passengers so it'll be interesting to see how that kind of progresses celebrity are planning on increasing that slowly they're not gonna go from a thousand to full capacity but they're slowly gonna add more and more people because of the covert safety measures guests really do need the extra space when we're in the buffet every other table would be cordoned off don't sit here social distancing that would be the same in the theater in the bars and the lounges but i imagine as that relaxes the passenger numbers will increase and things will get back to normal the food was definitely one of the main things i was looking forward to on this cruise even though i only cruised for three days with celebrity before i have very fond memories of the plates of cookies of the yorkshire puddings in the buffet and i was really keen to try the food again at the time that buffet was my favorite cruise ship buffet and i'm happy to say i think it still is the buffet is very similar to how it was pre-covered the only difference really is that you wear a mask when you're walking around and the food is served to you and you just take your plate and you go and sit down there's no more of those sharing tongs which i think really is a good thing we've all been in the buffet when someone's picked something up decided that they didn't want it and put it back and i don't want that to ever come back to buffets again i'm much happier with the current setup at the moment all celebrity cruises include drinks wi-fi and gratuities just as standard in the cruise price i have to admit that has kind of priced me out of taking a celebrity cruise i'm definitely more of a budget cruiser but for the celebrity cruises market it makes perfect sense and it makes things so much easier i did find the included drinks part a bit confusing i just felt like it could have been clearer i did mention it to a few people who worked for celebrity and they all took my opinion on board and they actually seemed to care about what i was saying which isn't something i'm i'm really used to but it was brilliant they said they were aware of why it might be a bit confusing and that they are working on making it clearer i took a cruise a month ago with msc which had included drinks and on msc every drink 10 pounds or under was included 10 pounds all over you pay for it that was very easy and that was really kind of told to you over and over again on the celebrity cruise i found out that the included drinks meant that you had the classic package included but i didn't really know what was inside that classic package when you scanned the menu in different bars sometimes it would come up with classic cocktails classic beers sometimes it would just come up with drinks with prices i didn't know what the drink's price limit was i believe it's eleven dollars per drink but it just could have been clearer it just didn't need to be that confusing it's definitely not the end of the world you could just ask your waiter which drinks are included and i ended up screenshotting different menus on my phone so that i could look back at the lists and work out what i wanted i just felt like it could have been a bit better and it wouldn't take a lot to make it clearer so i thought it was worth mentioning i have put together a guide of which drinks are included including all of the drinks from the menus that i found and i enjoyed on this cruise you can check that out on my website our first port stop was in dover and we took an excursion on the kenton sussex railway down in the south coast of england i'm from the south coast of england so it was a little bit strange to do an excursion so close to home but we still had a really good time on the train at the minute if you're taking a celebrity cruise you have to do organized excursions i don't think that that will be the case for very long though and if you know me you know i normally do my own excursions and i probably would in future but this was fun when we first got onto the bus and we went on to the train it was incredibly foggy it was incredibly rainy and i had visions of us just seeing white fog all the way on the train luckily it did clear we kind of had blue skies and by the time we got back onto the ship the weather was lovely typical then it would rain as soon as we got off and was lovely as soon as we got back on board but i guess that is the english summer for you it is unpredictable when we got on board we went to the theater and then had one of the most memorable dinners that i've ever had on a cruise all of the singers and the dancers in the theater were absolutely amazing and you could film and take photos during the shows which is something i'm not used to everyone watching the show had to wear their mask and i would say the majority of people did do that you also had to keep two seats between you and the other cruise parties we never struggled to get a seat but again our cruise was at reduced capacity but i imagine as they'll increase the capacity they'll also increase the capacity of the theater so it'll be fine this theater has two levels which i really like so if we were a bit late we would come in at the top sit in the back and just look down by late i mean still on time i'm one of these people who i think on time is about 15 minutes early and if you're five minutes early you're late i don't know if anyone's like that let me know but if we came in five minutes before we would just sit at the top sometimes things would come out of the stage like a pole like a podium like a smoke machine it was very visually appealing and all of the costumes were really cool and colorful too there was no kind of cd soundtrack either everything was backed by a real band with multiple people in it playing all of these instruments in real time which was really cool afterwards we went to dinner in a place called la petite chef which describes itself as a one-of-a-kind dining experience and it really lived up to that name i've never seen anything like it before i've never seen anything like it since when i was describing it to my mum where we were going to dinner and what it was going to be like i don't know if she believed me or she thought i was making it up the main idea behind le petit chef is that a little animated man cooks and prepares your dinner for you i know that sounds crazy but it is a real thing we would be sat at the table it would go dark and your plate would light up at that point a little man would walk across your plate he would you know scoop fish out of the sea he would cut up vegetables he would use snow to make your ice cream and he would basically design your dinner on your plate for you and then your real food would arrive and this would happen for every course the kind of default recommended menu on board was a lobster dish and the alternative was a meat dish i'm vegetarian so i had to ask for a vegetarian alternative which they had and they were very happy to bring that to me it just meant that the vegetarian meal didn't match the animation but i suppose that makes sense it's more interesting to see a little man kind of catching a fish than it is making a lentil or cheese tart or something like that i did find the vegetarian options a bit limited and i was kind of expecting to it was fine in the buffet but in the main dining room sometimes only one out of nine of the main courses would be vegetarian and normally that would be a cheese which is fine for me but if you're vegan the main menu isn't really going to work for you that said celebrity would do anything for you they will create anything i'm sure but it could just be a bit easier for vegetarian and for vegan people it seems to be an american cruise line thing not just the celebrity cruises thing i found the same on royal caribbean norwegian cruise line here in the uk i think it's around 20 of us don't eat meat so the british and the european cruise lines i've just found tend to do that a bit better not that i was hungry for even a second not for a second all of the vegetarian food was great i just feel like american cruise lines this is an area where they could improve we had a really good evening in this restaurant we did do a couple of other specialty restaurants too all of which were brilliant but i think this is the one that's really going to stick in my mind long term because i've never seen anything like it one area that has been totally refurbed during the refurbishment is the craft social bar this used to be a wine bar it used to be kind of dark and mysterious and now it is this bar this is what it looks like the way that they pour you a pint in this bar can only be described as magic i've definitely never seen that before i don't think you can really call it pouring you're not pouring magic we did do beer tasting and i'm not really into my beer i have to admit most beer just tastes like beer to me but we did have a good time and you can imagine how popular this bar was when the football was on very popular i can't believe i haven't mentioned the cookies yet every cruise i go on i make it my mission to find and try some cookies on celebrity they have amazing cookies in the buffet and they also have cookies in the cafe there will be a jar you just ask whoever's there to give you a cookie they give you a cookie in a little bag if you want more you just ask for more unlimited cookies and they were very good i think princess are still holding my number one spot for cookies but celebrities are definitely coming up there i have to try some more to work it out our second port stop was in belfast and we went to the titanic museum which was awesome i'm really into my ship history you'll find a lot of ship history on my website the thing that surprised me about this museum though was that it had a ride in the middle i was used to you know walking around reading things having the headset on came round the corner and there's a ride you get on this ride it takes you through the part where they're kind of building the titanic it was very cool i liked it it was a bit strange to do our tour as a covered safe bubble because we always had to stay together but i don't think that'll be the case for much longer and i'll talk i did a really good job of keeping everybody together that's not an easy job it was really nice to hear from her how much belfast had missed tourism how much it had missed cruise ships and it felt so good just to just to be back and just to be doing something touristy we haven't done that in such a long time i thought that the museum did a really good job of kind of sharing the story in a way that wasn't just overly depressing it went all the way through from belfast before titanic to exploring the wreck with these little cameras this here is a mock-up of a third class cabin on board let me know if you would be happy to stay in this on your next cruise after going to the titanic museum we did a tour of belfast which was really nice to see more i'm a big game of thrones fan so we did get to see some kind of game of thrones filming sets i definitely want to come back to belfast so that i can do more of that stuff i think for me personally that's one of my favorite things about cruising you can have a little taster of any place and you can decide where you want to go back to i hadn't considered before going to belfast for the weekend but now that i visited for a day on the cruise i would like to go back and i think i will back on the ship we spent quite a lot of time in what is called the sky lounge it is this huge lounge that has glass windows all around the side i really miss it when a cruise ship doesn't have a lounge like that i tend to sit there in the daytime they've added all of these rocking chairs there since the last reverb and quite a lot of people did fall asleep there this was a place where they had music they would do game shows in there too and it was quite popular like a nice calm place to hang out when the rest of the ship was watching football that place wasn't so i would be in there sometimes you can really see the differences in this area between my before ship tour and my after ship tour in the before one i struggled to film anything in there because it was so busy and i didn't have that problem on the more recent cruise our next port stop was liverpool and we did the thing that you have to do when you go to liverpool and that is the beatles experience we did a walking tour around liverpool then went to the beatles experience we explored the docks we saw all kinds of cool places in liverpool i'd never been to liverpool before this was my first time i did meet quite a few people on the ship who were from near liverpool i also met quite a few youtube subscribers on the ship too which was really cool if you're watching this now and you talk to me on the ship thank you for talking to me i had a brilliant time and it was so nice to see so many friendly faces around the ship it was strange for me but really really good one of my favorite things about the celebrity ships is the size and the number of swimming pools that they have they have two huge swimming pools in the middle of the pool deck and they also have this amazing inside solarium area which did get used quite a lot on our cruise because the weather wasn't always sunny i was so busy on this cruise with tours and excursions and specialty meals and doing all kinds of things that i don't normally do that i actually didn't go swimming at any point on this cruise i have been swimming before though so i feel like i could imagine what that was like what was nice about this cruise for me was that i got to do things that i wouldn't have even really imagined i had a friend who was staying in a suite who let me tour the suite which was awesome more about that coming in a later video i asked my mum how she would describe this cruise because this was her first celebrity cruise she described the cruise as fantastic and the food as delicious so there you have it that's the final answer from my mum delicious and fantastic join me in this video as we embark on the celebrity silhouette the first time you can see in this video how much the ship has changed and also i think how much i've changed i think i look really strange in this video i had just shaved my head i think six months earlier for charity which is why i look kind of odd but it is what it is watch that video next

Channel: Emma Cruises

Views: 264,721

Keywords: celebrity cruises, celebrity silhouette, cruise tips

Id: WwUR6HjfU0I

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021