A very short post for this short cruise in 2023 aboard Celebrity Silhouette to Amsterdam and back, with photos of the food aboard on the last two nights because there are people out there who will absolutely want to see what food on plates looks like, and also some concluding thoughts on our second Celebrity cruise.
A summary of the final thirty six hours on the ship to start with.
We’d spent the day over the water from the main part of Amsterdam that most people visit when they hit the capital city of the Netherlands and very much enjoyed the street art museum, STRAAT, and the visit to Oedipus Brewery.
Celebrity Silhouette was due to depart late at night so we didn’t eat ashore, instead making it back in plenty of time to hit the main dining room for dinner, and the remainder of the evening was spent hopping around the bars and making use of our drinks package.
Towards the very end of the evening I took a few photos of some of the more vacant spaces on the ship as she began the slow cruise along the IJ towards the locks at IJmuiden.
The final day on the ship was a typical lazy sea day of quizzes, reading, and watching the world go by, snacking, and drinking, but not going crazy because the following day would be an early departure to get to the car and get home in time for work, and we didn’t want a repeat of the over-the-top experience of the last night of our first cruise on Silhouette a few years earlier.
It was nice to pass between Dover and Calais and to see both coastlines from the ship as well as just how busy the route was with ferries.
There were other cruise bloggers on this cruise and there had been talk amongst them all of meeting up to discuss god-knows-what or network or whatever. Fortunately for us, only one of those people knew what we looked like as we’d met before, knew we’d probably not want to join in, and she came to warn us about the meeting because it was due to take place at a table next to us in a bar we were sitting at. We decided to just sit and watch from a distance and were glad we did. We like to stay on the periphery of things because you can sometimes get glimpses of the real people that way when they’re not presenting the social media friendly version of themselves. The things we could tell you about some of the things other cruise bloggers have done or said when they don’t realise who you are or what you can overhear!
And finally, the final night’s dinner and proof that we were back on the Martinis.
We had not been impressed with our first cruise on Celebrity Silhouette, largely because everyone had played up just how good Celebrity were in terms of style and food and service, and it had mostly been utterly appalling in those last two categories in particular. This second cruise on Silhouette, to the same place, was definitely better for its lack of outright staff hostility but we were still left mostly underwhelmed.
We avoided speciality dining this time because we’d been unimpressed before, sticking to the main dining room. Our waiters were lovely, but the food was once more not great. Temperature problems, lack of taste. Nothing terrible, but not very good either.
The drinks range on the ship was good, and the quality of the drinks was also good, but service in some of the bars was woeful as there were not enough staff to cover the area so only the people near the bar ever seemed to get any table service. That’s poor management and poor training.
Silhouette has some nice areas, yes, but it also has some quite hideous parts. For what Celebrity tend to charge for their cruises, they’re simply not a line we’re really ever going to consider again because we’ve been let down by the food twice now and the ratio of staff to passengers in bars was awful. Short cruises aren’t always the best way to experience a line but their pricing makes longer cruises a financial risk we’re not prepared to take, and we were only on the ship again this time – like those other cruise bloggers – because it was a good deal.
But we enjoyed Amsterdam, especially visiting different parts of it this time around, and not just posting photos from the same old locations everyone else goes to time after time. The cruise was a nice break, we didn’t come away thinking dark thoughts about the cruise line, but it would take a spectacular itinerary at a fantastic price to tempt us aboard again.