Celebrity Solstice
Celebrity Solstice docked in Ketchikan, fresh out of a refit that turned out to be way more than a coat of paint.
We had been to Alaska once before, twenty years ago, on a different Celebrity ship and with friends rather than family. We had sailed the Solstice before too, though never up here. This trip put the two together for the first time, and knowing the ship beforehand is what let us see exactly what the refit changed.
We booked an accessible AquaClass cabin and traveled with four other couples, all of them in AquaClass as well. Ten people with ten sets of opinions is a hard audience for any ship, and it answered questions we could not have alone. The Solstice came out of a major refit earlier this year, the first of the Solstice-class ships to get the treatment, and we went in expecting things to be cleaned up and modernized. Fresh carpet and new soft goods.
That is not what happened. Every change we noticed was an improvement, and two of the new rooms are good enough that we would sail this ship again for them alone. What most people do not realize about a revitalization is how rarely that is true. Usually there is one clear win and a few compromises. We kept waiting for the letdown and it never came.
The Stateroom
The cabin has been updated and it shows, though not everywhere. The bathroom fixtures did not appear to be new, but everything was in good condition and nothing about the room read as tired. The bed was very comfortable under a decent duvet, and the decor sits above what most mainstream lines put in a standard balcony room.
Several of our friends kept coming back to the shower, which has multiple jets. We had a yoga mat in the closet, along with robes and slippers that come with the category rather than the ship. AquaClass also gets two bottles of water replenished daily. It is a nice thing to have in the room, and most ships at this price do not bother.
One real miss. The rooms now have USB-A and USB-C outlets beside the bed, which is the right thing to add. There are standard plugs elsewhere in the cabin, just not at the bedside, which is exactly where you want one.
For us the location did more work than any single feature. Our accessible cabin sat close to the forward elevator lobby, and on a ship this size that changes how much of it you actually use. The balcony ramp mattered just as much. It was relatively flat, which is not a given, and the cabin had a power door, which makes getting in and out something you stop thinking about.
Not all AquaClass cabins sit near the spa, which we had assumed they did. Friends of ours covered a long distance to reach the thermal suite while we covered a short one, and there is no fixing that once you are aboard.
Request This: A starboard cabin on an Alaska itinerary. Sailing through places like the Inside Passage, the starboard side generally runs closer to land, so the view off your balcony is the better one. The difference is not enormous, and this is our opinion rather than a rule, but it is the question we get asked most often about Alaska.
Advisor Note: If the thermal suite is why you are paying for AquaClass, book a cabin close to the spa at the time you book the cruise rather than assuming the category puts you there.
Our accessible AquaClass cabin, with enough floor space that getting around never took planning, a relatively flat balcony ramp, and a door that opens with a button.
The Dining Scene
Celebrity is a line where the specialty restaurants, the ones that carry a per-person charge on top of your fare, earn what they cost. The included food is already good, and the specialty rooms run better than what most mainstream lines manage. In AquaClass you also get Blu, which sits between the two. We ate across all of it over the week.
Fine Cut Steakhouse: The Edge-class steakhouse has come over to the Solstice, and it is now our favorite steakhouse on any cruise line. Service was excellent. The food was better still. We had the filet mignon and the Dover sole, every starter we tried landed, and the sides were excellent. We split a single ice cream sundae for dessert because neither of us could manage a whole one. The room helps more than we expected. It sits at the very aft with floor-to-ceiling windows, and when the view out of them is Alaska, that does as much for dinner as anything on the plate. The other detail we keep coming back to is the dinner rolls, warm and served with soft butter, and every person gets their own butter plate rather than one shared dish passed down the table.
Trattoria Rossa: The first Italian restaurant of its kind in the Celebrity fleet. It may be the best Italian specialty restaurant we have eaten in at sea. The room feels more like a modern steakhouse than an Italian restaurant. It runs along the side of the ship, so the windows are small and you watch the water go by instead of taking in a view. Our waiter Mario is the reason the meal became the story of the week. We could not choose between several dishes, so he offered to bring out a small sampling of them. What arrived was not a sampling. Our table was covered in full portions. He came by to talk. He fixed things before we asked. By the end of the meal it felt less like good service and more like being fed by family. We hope Celebrity rolls this concept out across the fleet, and especially onto the Edge-class ships.
Order This: The ravioli agli spinaci. A spinach ravioli was not what we expected to remember from a ship, and it was one of the best things we ate all week. Our friends had the tagliata di manzo alla Toscana, the Tuscan sliced grilled beef, and it was excellent too.
Don't Miss: The tableside work. Mario made cannoli by hand at our table and built one of the best Caesar salads we have had anywhere, and neither is something you order by reading the menu.
Blu: The AquaClass restaurant and the other half of why people book the category. It is health-forward, which suits us, and we liked the decor and the range on the menu. It was not a hit with everyone in our group, so we did not end up eating dinner there most nights. Blu is open for breakfast too, and that is where it won us over. It served the best sit-down breakfast we found on board. The muesli, layered like a parfait, was a favorite of ours and of our friends.
Grand Epernay: We ate one night in the main dining room and it was fine, roughly what you get on any mainstream line. Blu is better than that, though not dramatically so.
Oceanview Café: The buffet beats the average cruise buffet, and we are still not buffet people. It leaned into the mix of guests aboard with themed food nights, a smart read of who was actually sailing.
Café al Bacio: The group meeting spot. The specialty coffees were decent rather than memorable but it is where you go for a latte, so we went often.
Murano: We did not eat here this time. Our group was not interested and we stayed with them. However, we have eaten there several times before and it has always been excellent. It reads as French but sits closer to continental European.
Advisor Note: Specialty dining prices have climbed to the point where it barely reads as a surcharge anymore. You are simply paying for dinner in a restaurant. Fine Cut at $65 and Trattoria Rossa at $55 were both worth it but we could not say that about every specialty room we have paid for.
Our group of ten at Fine Cut steakhouse. The aft windows run floor to ceiling, and when what is out there is Alaska, the room needs nothing else. The food, however, was also spectacular.
Life Onboard
Sunset Park: The change we did not see coming. The old Lawn Club was real grass on the top deck, unusual and, we always thought, close to wasted space. Every time we went up there it sat mostly empty. It is now an open-air space built around the views, with enough different places to sit that you can pick one and stay a while. What used to be a deck we passed through became a deck we spent time on.
Sunset Park Café: The new bistro attached to the park. We had the lobster bisque, and they put out warm cookies daily, which is the kind of small treat that gets a whole group going up two decks.
Sky Observation Lounge: The indoor counterpart, and on an Alaska sailing there may be no more useful room on the ship. Glass runs most of the way around the forward end of it, so you get the scenery without the cold, which matters more up here than it would anywhere warm. We spent hours in it. The entertainment was a real draw too, and the candlelit concert they run in that room was one of the better things we saw all week. They scatter candles across the whole space, not one of them real, because open flames and cruise ships do not mix. What nobody plans for is the light. An Alaska summer keeps the sun up so late that the room never went dark, so we sat through a candlelit concert in broad daylight. It should not have worked as well as it did.
The Parlor: The other addition we loved, a sports bar that is not the usual sports bar. There is billiards, darts, shuffleboard, foosball, skee-ball, and a library of board games, so it works whether or not you care what is on the screens. Games ran in every corner while professional sports played on the screens above them, and the room stayed full of people enjoying themselves for completely different reasons. The food carries a charge and runs better than standard bar food. The nachos, which you can have built on steak fries instead, were enormous. Four people could eat that and nothing else. We managed a quarter of it. The tempura cauliflower with dipping sauces was the other thing we would order again.
The Persian Garden: The thermal suite on Solstice-class ships, and AquaClass gets unlimited access to it. There are around ten heated tile loungers along with wet and dry saunas. The loungers were the draw for all of us, and one of our friends threatened to move into the dry sauna permanently.
We barely used it. With ten of us aboard and Alaska outside, we ran out of time. If you are booking AquaClass mainly for the thermal suite, think about your itinerary and your group first. A Caribbean sailing leaves you long afternoons to fill. Alaska does not. The suite is also smaller than the ones on newer ships and was not expanded in the refit, so it did get crowded. We waited for a heated lounger several times, usually less than ten minutes, which is not something we run into on most newer ships.
Boulevard Lounge: A good space that is too small for what it is being asked to do. It hosts the game shows and the dueling pianos, and the pianos drew far more people than the room holds. We went to one game show, thought it was fine, and did not go back, though others in our group loved them.
Solstice Theater: The main room was strong. Celebrity does this better than almost anyone outside Disney, and the Solstice held that up with real talent and shows built around an idea. It is still a cruise ship rather than Broadway but the effort is visible.
Cold and wet, and we never went inside. Watching Hubbard Glacier from our own balcony with coffee is the whole argument for booking one on this itinerary.
The Experience
Cruise Line: Celebrity occupies the space between the mass-market lines and the luxury ones, and the specialty restaurants are where that position is easiest to see, since they would hold their own against lines charging a great deal more. The decor is more refined than what the mass-market brands put out, and the rooms are quieter and more formal, which some travelers read as polish and others read as stuffy.
Atmosphere: The refit brings the Solstice much closer to the Edge-class ships, and she does not show her age anywhere we looked. She feels modern and classy without trying too hard, and she is easy to move through. The crowd skewed older, as Celebrity crowds tend to, though it was more mixed than we have sometimes seen, with a fair number of families aboard.
Crew: Service was uniformly good for a full week, and we did not have one bad interaction. Morale was visibly high and the staff seemed happy to be there, which is hard to fake across seven days. Celebrity service is not proactive the way luxury lines are. Nobody anticipates what you need before you say it. Ask for something and it is handled well and without fuss. Coming off several recent mainstream sailings, that consistency stood out more than it should have to.
They have also kept evening turndown, while Norwegian, Carnival, and Royal Caribbean have all dropped twice-daily service for standard cabins to cut costs. Plenty of people will tell you turndown is unnecessary, and they are right that it is not essential. Fares did not come down when it disappeared, though, and we notice its absence on every ship that cut it.
Accessibility
The Good: This is one of the more accessible mainstream ships we have sailed. Accessible restrooms are spread across the ship rather than tucked into one or two spots, and the doors are automatic, which is convenient and also more sanitary than pulling a handle. What impressed us most was the pool lifts. There was more than one, serving both the pools and the spa, and none of them were covered up. They looked ready to be used the moment someone needed one. That sounds minor until you have seen how often a lift sits shrouded in a corner, technically present and functionally unavailable. Theater sightlines were good from every spot we tried.
The Reality: The accessible section in the theater is limited, and we got lucky. There were almost no scooters on this sailing, which is unusual at this end of the market, so availability was never an issue. On other ships, a section that size would have filled fast, and that is what we would plan around. The new carpet is the other thing to know. It looks very good and it takes more effort to push through than what it replaced, though a fair amount of the ship is hard surface, so it comes and goes.
On the deck of the Aleutian Ballad in Ketchikan, with some of the the crew who made the whole thing an amazing experience.
The TudorTravels Perspective
Celebrity should do this to the rest of the Solstice-class ships as fast as they can.
If food is not a priority for you and main dining and a buffet suit you fine, this is money spent on something you will not use. The same goes if you want a younger high-energy crowd or you are traveling with children, since this line has never chased either and does not pretend otherwise.
If you want better and more varied food, a more upscale atmosphere to sit in, fewer kids, and a quieter evening that still has strong entertainment behind it, this is a good fit.
On AquaClass specifically, we learned something from watching ten people evaluate the same purchase. It is worth it if you are a spa person, since it includes the thermal suite and comes with discounts on spa treatments, and if healthier and more interesting food appeals to you at Blu. If neither of those is you, AquaClass may not be either. Some of our group thought it was clearly worth the money and others did not, and both were right about their own trip. If what you want is better dining every night plus privacy on a big ship, look at The Retreat instead, the suite-only area with its own restaurant and sundeck. Our Celebrity Beyond review goes deeper on that.
Drink prices appear to have roughly doubled over the past decade, which outruns inflation by a wide margin, and the push toward packages is obvious. That matters well beyond this ship. Once you add a drink package, gratuities, and wifi, the gap between a premium fare and a luxury line that includes all of it narrows more than most people expect. Price the whole thing rather than the headline fare.
Bottom line. If what Celebrity does well is what you want out of a week at sea, the food and the more upscale surroundings, this is one of the best choices in the mainstream market, and the refit made it a better one. Virgin Voyages has become a real competitor to Celebrity, though with all four Virgin ships being essentially the same ship, Celebrity offers more range. Plenty of other lines do their own thing well, and the right cruise line depends on who is sailing and what they want out of the week.
Ready to talk through whether Celebrity Solstice is the right fit for your next trip? Contact us to start planning.