BIG SHIP CRUISING


Total Eclipse


Editor Simon Veness runs the rule over


Celebrity’s latest Solstice-class vessel and assesses whether this is the new gold standard of big-ship cruising


O


f all the mainstream lines, Celebrity Cruises have done most to advance the cause of large-scale premium cruising.


From Century in 1995 to Millennium in 2000 and then Celebrity Solstice in 2008, they have pushed the envelope of size- versus-style to the maximum. With the exception of a handful of minor glitches – a few drops in cuisine standard here, the occasional service


lapse there – they have pulled it off with immense aplomb. And the advent of the three-ship Solstice-class vessels (four this July with Celebrity Silhouette) was widely hailed as the biggest increase in pure style since the debut of the Century. Fittingly, both that 1995 series and the latest trio all hail from the Meyer-Werft shipyard in Papenburg, Germany, which has been the source of much cruise sophis- tication in the past 20 years.


So I thought it was time to run an editori-


al eye over Celebrity’s latest offering, which will see all four Solstice vessels in European waters this summer, once Silhouette enjoys her inauguration in Hamburg on July 21. I caught up with the Eclipse in Miami for her standard 7-night eastern Caribbean route this spring, when the object wasn’t so much to enjoy some Caribbean sun- shine as give this 122,000-ton, 2,850-pas- senger ship a serious once-over.


Summer 2011 I WORLD OF CRUISING


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