So much to like but so much to be dissapointed with.

So impressed with our cruise on Eclipse in 2015, booked on Millenium for SouthEast Asia from Hong Kong to Singapore via Vietnam & Thailand. Sadly, Millenium is not the Eclipse.

All the staff are helpful, customer oriented and cheerful. Some of them go out of their way to give customer satisfaction and even though we pay gratuities up front, several crew members impressed so much we gave extra cash tips. We don't mind if that is their intention but if someone looks after us extra well, we are happy to show our appreciation.

Embarkation procedure was faultless. Took 20 minutes from arriving to actually being on board. Rooms are not available until 2pm ish as always - no problem. So its a good opportunity to explore the ship, deck by deck and learn where all the facilities are. It was during this exploratory exercise that our first concerns were raised. It is the general careworn condition of the ship. As an example, having wandered about for an hour or so, we stopped in the Rende-Vouz bar for a drink and immediately noticed that not one of the lamp shades over the bar was intact. Everyone is broken or tatty. This causes you to start looking at everything with more attention to detail. Also, having presented our seapass cards for our drinks we were then subjected to an 'upsale' dialogue from the barman. We had taken the Classic package which more than cater's for our requirements but the barman was almost dismissive about its quality and did press us for sometime to upgrade. Clearly on commission! Part of his diatribe was that bottled water was not included in our Classic package. For two days we did not order bottled water because of his remarks. Turned out that premium bottled water such as Evian or Perrier are not included but lesser brands are. This misinformation and other lack of communication on various issues became a gripe of ours throughout the cruise. An example of this - we were required to surrender our passports to the ship for our immigration into Vietnam, Thats OK, its a normal requirement. We needed to retrieve our passports for our visit to Bangkok as we were disembarking for the night and staying over in the city. The info we were given was that we could collect our passports from 7pm to 9pm the night before. Question, what are most people doing between those hours? Either getting ready for dinner or at dinner! What a dumb time to arrange for this to done as I told the Customer Relations desk during the afternoon and I was very blunt about it and said it was not convenient. Oddly, later that afternoon, a note was passed around the ship advising passengers who could not collect their passports at the allotted time could do so at theit leisure. This is just one example of organisation that was always in the favour of ease for the ship - not the passenger - the paying customer. Everything seems to be angled towards making the passengers carry out their own tasks at their own expense of precious holiday time. Can you imagine hundreds of passengers during a two hour time period trying to retrieve their passports at the same time? No thought was given to this as I pointed out to them.

Again, and this is just another example of lack of info and poor organisation.

Upon arrival in Singapore, passengers were advised at around 8,30 am that immigration had cleared the ship and people could start to leave the ship. Then the messages startde over the tannoy systemj. Due to long queues, disembarkation was taking a while and would passengers be patient. This went on for 4 hours. The real reason for the delays is that Singapore immigration allow only 50 people off at a time for the purpose of checking passports and completing landing cards. Were we told - No. But this is standard procedure in Singapore and therefore Celebrity staff must know this as they are in and out of Singapore regularly. But it suits them to have passngers standing around in corridors and gangways for hours rather than give passengers tickets with a disembarkation time. Holiday time is precious and we do not go on holiday to stand about in queues just to make life easy for the cruise company. There are other examples but the above should be enough to make any potential cruisers aware and to ask questions about arrangements the ship make for you.

The food - oh dear! Oceanview on deck 10. Poor selection, poorly prepared and mostly boring. Not a patch compared to Eclipse - unless of course its policy throughout the fleet now and the food we experienced is the same on all Celebrity ships. The Select Dining lounge fare is better but had a couple of bad meals in their also. Speciality Dining - absolutey no problems but then @ $50 per head thats a given.

Other general comments - rust and flaky paint all around, spilt paint on balcony glass screens, doors hanging off wardrobe, TV made an annoying buzzing sound. Just generally 'tired.'

Planning to cruise on Eclpise to the Baltic from Southampton - watch this space!