Celebrity is Listening!

A SHORT time back, I suggested here that one of the things I would like to see is for cruise lines to add more overnight itineraries to their sailings! After our last couple Celebity cruises, when given the opportunity to make suggestions in their surveys, I have seconded this suggestion. I have always lamented that the only real negative I see in our cruises is the lack of time to get to know our ports and spend time there during evening and in some of our cases (we photographers) during the early morning hours. Setting up cruises with more overnight stays in ports (and maybe even multiple nights) seemed to be a winning proposition to me.

WELL, IT appears that they listened! LOL, I am not naive enough to believe they read this blog, or take my personal recommendations into account. What I do think happened is that I was not the only one making this observation. Happily, there must have been many more with the same thinking - and perhaps some in management to boot.

CELEBRITY RELEASED its 2027-2028 sailings and there appears to be an emphasis on more overnight ports and longer port stays (12 hours) in general. Hooray! According to Cruise Critic, Celebrity offerings in 2027-28 will include 60 overnight port stays, and 115 12-hour or longer port calls. This is great news to me, though how it personally effects each of us will no doubt vary. One heartening example was the suggestion that there would be multiple overnight stays during a single cruise in Japan. Will we see others? We will have to check the itineraries to see.

CHECKING MY own booked cruises, I was very pleased to see that a planned Greek Isle Tour (with Turkey and Greece in the mix) has some seemingly very long port stops at almost every port, and includes what I see as a extra long overnight in Istanbul. This is one of the most favorable cruises I have seen in a very long time.

WILL OTHER cruise lines come aboard with this new trend? Time will tell, as it will no doubt be governed by their own market research and how well received the Celebrity program is.

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THE PREVIOUS post concluded our pretty eventful 1013 cruising year. We would ultimately get home after some continuing adventures, and regroup. Princess did everything they promised, and we certainly didn't leave that experience with any kind of bad taste in our mouth. Indeed, in spite of our work commitments and being somewhat new to cruising, we jumped right back in, with cruises - this time with a group of long-time friends in Saginaw, where we lived, for winter "getaway" cruises in 2014 and 2015, and then with "both proverbial feet" in 2015 (back again on Princess for our "makeup" cruise) in the Mediterranean in 2015. Those stories are coming up in future posts, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I am leaving yet again for 10 days in Vermont to shoot the fall foliage. When I return in mid-October, I promise to get things back on track. Until then . . . . .