7 Nights Idyllic Aegean, 7 Nights Cruise Cruise

cozy, intimate cruise with great service and food

I'm generally not a cruise person. I don't like how crowded it is, and how at every port we get off with thousands of other people. I find the experience to be annoying. I was even more skeptical of the fact that Celestyal Journey is a renovated 20 year old vessel. However, my expectations have been greatly exceeded with this particular company, and cruise ship. Keep in mind these are my experience alone. You may share all, some, or none of it. EMBARKATION: I'm going to start by talking about some issues I have had with the booking/planning process. They give you very little in the way of timing, and I found much of their processes to be incredibly vague. 1) When do the excursions take place? And how long do they last? I was trying to book some private tours, and I was having a hard time combining it with the shore excursions because I couldn't get any estimates of timing. I even asked our travel agent to reach out to Celestyal, and they refused to give any timing (not even broad estimates, eg. morning to noon) - citing operational reasons. For example, it might depend on weather, number of participants, availability of personnel, etc. I watched youtube reviews, and read numerous other reviews. I could infer when things PROBABLY happened, but they were very rarely mentioned specifically (if ever). So I attach here the exact timings as they occurred for my cruise (see attachments) for each port. I would say that we had what would be a pretty representative cruise, the weather was calm and hot on each day. No windstorms, rain, nothing. Each tour was reasonably full with at least 1 full bus, if not 2 or more. Half day excursions seemed to be about 5 hours in duration. For example, the Spectacular Oia tour ran from 7:30am to 12:30pm. Full day excursions (ex. Milos Land & Sea) went from 8:15am to 5:30pm. Note that these times represent meet up (ex. at 8:15am) and arriving at the docks at the end of the day (ex. at 5:30p) - not that you were full guided for this entire duration. There would be time spent waiting for bus assignment, tendering, etc. Just the duration that you would be unavailable for booking other tours. Be reminded that these are the timings as they occurred for MY cruise, Celestyal makes no promises that this would be the timing for other cruises. However, if i were wishing to make other private tours after the Spectacular Oia shore excursion, I would be pretty reasonably sure that I can make a 3pm Oia Sunset cruise tour (in the average scenario). 2) Check-in and embarkation information was pretty sparse. What it boiled down to was - show up in Piraeus Terminal A. When we showed up, there was some mention of an online check-in being available which allowed you to skip the check-in line. I didn't see how to do this anywhere, so had to line up. The line up was in the usual hot and smokey (from cigarettes) Greek environment and took about 30-40 minutes of queuing. If I were to do it again, I would probably inquire with my travel agent about online check-in to save myself the discomfort of queuing in the smokey heat. Here, I will talk about my general impressions of the cruise. There are numerous reviews online which discuss their experience with the food, tours, etc. I won't go into elaborate detail about those. ROOM: There are lots of reviews for the balcony rooms. However, I had the interior cabins on deck 10. There are signs that it's an old boat, particularly the lighting was still fluorescent and still flickered on. Sometimes it would flicker for a couple seconds. Besides that, it was a very comfortable color temperature. The bathroom was very clean and surprisingly spacious for a small space, with lots of space for belongings (for us, anyway). The water temperature was very consistent and the shower head was good. I enjoyed taking showers every evening after a smokey, hot, sweaty Greek day. The shower curtains did tend to let water out. I ended up using water to hold the shower curtains to the wall of the shower so that the curtains were smaller than the shower space (so the water drips inside, not out of the shower). There would still be spraying, but it's minor otherwise. There were lots of hangers provided and hooks as well on the walls. We had no issues for two people per cabin. Mattresses were foam and comfortable enough. Would be nice if they had newer mattresses, but I still got good sleep. Linens were clean. I have no bad things to say about the rooms. SERVICE: Service was great. All of our cabin attendants (we had 4 between the two rooms since the cutoff was right between our two rooms). They kept our rooms very tidy and clean. They were always around and available for requests. They always greeted you, but I did sometimes talk to them to ask them how they were. They work long days and I always appreciate it when people ask me how I am, so I try to genuinely ask them how they are too. It was fun having short bursts of conversation with them. Elsewhere, the kitchen, restaurant and bar staff were also fantastic. FOOD: Great food. We are mostly vegetarian and had no issues with food even on "meat-lovers" night. Speaking of which, every night had a different cuisine being presented. From what I can remember, there was - Greek, International, Meat-lovers, Seafood, Pan-asian. The food being served in the dining room (deck 7) and buffet (deck 11) are basically the same with minor differences. We went to the dining room 3 times, but the service was longer than we liked and it was also hard to get more of specific items like you could at a buffet. So we ended up going to the buffet for the rest of the trip. I also felt that the views were better at the buffet, since you could sit facing the windows. There are no handwashing stations, which is my biggest concern. As the cruise progressed, we also noticed more and more coughing and sneezing going on. We went first thing when the buffet opened to avoid over-crowding. In general the turn over of the food was quite high, so it never sat around for too long. Sometimes we would notice that other guests leave the utensils within the dish (eg. for fruits) and the handles would touch the fruit. This really bothered me and I tried to get these cold, easily contaminated dishes first. ENTERTAINMENT: Generally well done. Though I felt like sometimes the performers would be tasked with singing songs which they really were not great at singing. Not because they were technically poor performers, but they did have accents which kind of took you out of the performance. It was probably because I am a native English speaker. For the non-English songs, I didn't know any better. I'm guessing non-English speakers probably took no issues with their performance of English songs, haha. AMBIANCE: This was perhaps some of my favorite parts of the cruise ship. In the evening, there would just be people performing. The ship was quite small, so the distance between you and the performers was small. It felt intimate, and cozy. It wasn't glitzy or showy, it just felt comfortable. The performers were good but not initimidatingly good, and I enjoyed their singing of the source songs. Drinks staff were readily around inquiring if you needed something and were very attentive. One night, they even had the bar staff run a "variety show" type thing in the lounge on deck 8 right outside of the theater. I just happened to run by there accidentally, and it was such great fun seeing them run this event. It wasn't professional and that was the point, just guests and staff having fun. So I would encourage you to walk around randomly on the ship after dinner or show and you might run into something you like! OTHER AMENITIES: The only other thing we did use was the gym, which was very spacious and you had great views of the outside. It was next to the spa. When we got back earlier, we'd always go to the gym to work up an appetite for dinner. 100% recommended. We did two shore excursions, I'll discuss them here. SPECTACULAR OIA VILLAGE PERCHED ON THE CALDERA RIM: I read over and over, DON'T SPEND TIME SEEING THE SUNSET IN OIA. So I booked the morning tour to get the first tenders off the boat. By the time we got to the island it was already packed to the brim. The donkeys also splattered some poop on me as they walked by (so, give the donkeys lots of space unless you are feeling lucky). I found Santorini to be a very.. shallow place, much like the influencers who endlessly parrot this destination. Gorgeous next to the caldera, nothing much anywhere else. I planned on doing the famous Santorini photo walks (see youtuber Greece Explained) but scrapped all of it after seeing the lineups and feekung the heat, and cigarette smoke. We still got some great photos, but not the same photos are millions of others - oh well :) Enjoyment wise, I didn't get that much enjoyment out of this excursions, but do recommend it if you wish to get to Oia as early as possible (which wasnt THAT early). NOSTALGIC MILOS CRUISE LAND & SEA: This tour I whole heartedly recommend. We swam at two beaches (accessible if you had your own transport, but going by boat was very fun). We had 4ish hours on the boat and rest of the time by bus. We got about 1 hour to swim at each location. From land, we saw the beaches and Plaka. Milos is not really visited by the larger cruise companies so it was comparatively sleepy. I enjoyed this since I HATE crowds. The boat we got was also sheltered from the sun, which we saw that not all were. So we were doubly satisfied with the experience. Finally, I'll spend some time discussing each stop. HERAKLION: It was a relaxing stop. We walked the entire waterfront from the docks to the theater (about 10km round trip). Most of the sights were close to the waterfront, including white tower and a couple of statues. KUSADASI: We went to Kusadasi castle and then along the waterfront. Since we were previously in Turkiye, we took this opportunity to buy a bit more Turkish goods. We had dinner around sunset on deck 11, and sat at a window seat facing Kusadasi castle. It was a special experience having dinner next to the sun setting right behind the castle. HERAKLION: The port is a bit of a distance from the city center and NOT a pleasant walk since it is next to a busy highway. We also weren't really interested in the Knossos tour. We instead did the city center and went to the archaeological museum (recommended!). SANTORINI: We did the Spectacular Oia tour in the morning then rented a car at noon. We drove to ancient Thera to see the island away from the crowds. Afterwards we went to get lunch at Akrotiri then the light house and red beach. Honestly, I found everything else except the caldera rim to be much more enjoyable. I loved seeing Fira and Oia, but I would only ever do it once. It is too crowded to be enjoyable. It was much nicer after the other cruise ships left (since Celestyal stays past midnight). MYKONOS: Much more depth than Santorini and less crowded. Similarly beautiful in its own way. The town is quite small so we actually saw everything in short time. We had time to tender back to the ship for lunch, then head back close to sunset to catch it around area with windmills. MILOS: We spent the entire day with the shore excursion. I'm not quite sure what we would've done otherwise, so I would recommend this. That's my review of Celestyal Journey. I hope you found this helpful and informative.

Overall a great way to see the Greek Islands

Our cruise for 7 nights Mediterranean was fantastic. The staff were all great, all the way from checking in, luggage handlers at the port, concierge team, housekeeping, drinks/food waiters and the officers we came across, everyone greeted us and were courteous. The excursions were well organised. The food was plentiful and it had enough variety across 7 days. The main pool deck on level 11 was always busy, however was a nice spot for a drink and a laze around. I enjoyed a coffee in the morning at one of the quieter lounges. The only thing I would do is review the drink packages as we were on the sky high and I found it strange that I had to pay 1 Euro for a bottle water but I could get an alcoholic cocktail included for free. Also I felt a bit undervalued as an early signup for the cruise where I paid full price for the drink packages but others could get a 90 Euro discount if they signed up during the cruise. Lesson learned for that! With that being said, they were minor things in the scheme of things and we really enjoyed our cruise!!

Idyllic Aegean 7 nights

Now that the ship has been in service for coming to a year, I was pleasantly surprised by its delivery in the software areas. As its a refurbished ship one cannot compare it design to the newer ships. My cabin is clean, the toilets are well kept and all worked well. The balcony and its furniture are good. Food in the buffet restaurant (deck 11) and in the restaurants (deck 7 and 8) are good. There's a good variety and menu cycle. As we are in an affinity group of 78 people, the chef took the trouble of preparing a special dinner to supplement at each dinner in the various locations the members chose to seat. (food quantity was generous) The nighty shows were of a high quality and that was a surprise too - a big cast of performers. Embarkation/disembarkation including those on tender boats were smoothly handle. Service staff including the cabin service staff were friendly and polite Good schedule into the ports especially into Santorini. It's late departure past midnight allows guest to disembark late and return late to avoid the crush from the other ships (on our day of arrival there were no less than 6 cruises)