Cruise Ship Review

When the first cruise line employee I see on embarkation day (in this case, the woman who checked me in) is cheerful, considerate and genuinely nice, my expectations are raised. And then, when I am escorted to my stateroom by a smiling, charming and polite steward who grabs my carry-on and hands me a glass of sparkling wine, I start to believe that my expectations will be met. After all, how many ships offer escorts to your cabin these days? It was a lovely touch, and a preview of what was in store for us from the ship's attentive staff.

Celebrity's Mercury, which debuted in 1997 as the third and final vessel in the mid-sized Century class of ships, may be slightly overwhelmed by the larger and (comparatively speaking) glitzier series of vessels the line built in the 21st century -- Millennium, Infinity, Summit and Constellation. Indeed, it's smaller: Mercury measures 77,713 tons and carries 1,884 passengers. But with Millennium-class ships clocking in at 91,000 tons with 1,950 passengers, the minimal difference in size is not what's significant. The real distinction is that Mercury offers a simpler Celebrity experience.

Cabins with balconies are still a bit of a premium. The spa is a little smaller, there is no Spa Cafe and there are a few less bars. But Mercury in every other way very much reflects the elegant, big-ship Celebrity ethos. There is an abundance of original art and sculpture in public spaces (even in the Internet Cafe!). The Manhattan Restaurant, its main eatery, is gorgeous as are other public areas. It took us a moment to realize why we felt immediately relaxed upon embarking; beyond the attentive welcome, we realized that the ship is devoid of flashing neon, childlike promenade-deck murals and 10-story atriums. The vessel truly exudes peaceful, Zen-like elegance from bow to stern.

This trip, a mother-daughter repositioning cruise along the Pacific coast took place just at the ship's eighth anniversary. It's hard to think in terms of this gorgeous liner being considered "an older ship," because of the nearly pristine condition of its public spaces and posh furnishings.

It's almost sad to think of Mercury, on the high side of mid-sized, becoming a cruise industry dinosaur but it is true: Celebrity's future plans call for ships at least a third larger. What's nice about this ship is that it's big enough to offer the most important features (with all of the dining options available, we didn't even miss an alternative restaurant) -- and yet not too big. You'll find it easy to get your bearings and rarely feel overwhelmed by crowds.

Ultimately, what the ship lacks in the "extras" available on bigger ships, it more than makes up in intimacy and attention to detail.

Most memorable was the service we experienced (and our initial expectations were met in that regard). On Celebrity, "family" is the operative word. The staff and crew are called "family members," and guests are welcomed into "the Celebrity family." Unlike other cruise lines, where officers are rotated from ship to ship every few months, the staff members on Celebrity ships stay for two to four years. "They want us to 'own' our ship, and our commitment to it," I was told by a senior officer. "Things flow much more smoothly when there is continuity, when we can personally follow through on our work, when we build a team that works together. The guest's expectations are more easily met."

We can vouch for that. From the moment we boarded we felt like welcomed guests. By the time we disembarked, we were "family."

Public Rooms

On every ship there are always one or two spaces that just call out, that you somehow make your own, and Mercury had several of them for me and my daughter.

My favorite spot was the Cova Cafe di Milano, located just above the reception area in the Grand Foyer. Designed to replicate the famous Milanese original, this space is so soothing and elegant that you could swear you were actually in Europe surrounded by the high-style doyennes and literati that frequent Cova. In the afternoons and evenings, the ship's classical quartet or solo pianist provides accompaniment in the form of Mozart, Purcell, Chopin, Bach ... and I am certain that on at least one occasion I heard some Gershwin, too. Serving wine and various coffee beverages, the servers also bring around little hors d'oeuvres in the evening before dinner. Coffee drinks are served with a foil-wrapped chocolate. Because it's in the center of the ship it's a great people-watching space.

We also loved the area around the Palm Springs Pool at the aft of the Resort Deck, and spent a lot of time just sitting and reading. Our Pacific Northwest voyage, the last of the season, had several chilly days, so the covered atrium in this space was ideal. It gave us the opportunity to see just about everything, munch on pizza served all day if we chose, have a drink from the adjacent bar or coffee from the self-serve pot, and step outside onto the lovely back deck over the stern if the weather cooperated.

My daughter enjoyed the Navigator Club, the forward observation lounge at the top of the ship, for seclusion and great views during the day, and for the clubby atmosphere in the evenings.

Before dinner we really enjoyed stopping in Rendezvous Square for a drink or at the teeny Champagne Bar just outside of our lower-floor seating in the restaurant. I was really taken by the bubbles etched into the glass walls that surround it and didn't much mind that the guests in the Martini Bar, above, could look down on us from the recessed balcony.

There are a lot of lovely shops on Mercury, too; besides the usual logo and jewelry stores, there is an elegant florist which sells genuinely unique artistic creations to take home (candles, and jars filled with faux fruit and spices).

The Internet Center and library onboard are both quite elegant (there's a huge sculpture in the Internet Center, a nice surprise). Internet usage is fairly pricey at about 50 cents per minute; surprisingly, no packages are offered.

Dining

Celebrity is a traditional cruise line; for dinner, there are two seatings in the beautiful Manhattan Restaurant, located at the aft of the ship with a two-deck-high bank of windows overlooking the stern and large windows on each side. A sweeping Art Deco-inspired staircase bisects the center of the room (on one evening, my daughter and I arrived on the upper floor and felt like Oscar contenders as we made our grand entrance down the stairway to the lower level).

We were impressed with the number of seating options; in fact, we could have dined alone if we had wanted to. We chose a large table, and were happy that we did since we enjoyed the company and camaraderie of the others. But romantics can dine a deux and families can dine together -- we even saw a family with the adults at one table and the youngsters at an adjacent table, which we thought was brilliant.

Breakfast and lunch are served open seating in the Manhattan Restaurant, although most guests gravitated to the Palm Springs Cafe on the Resort Deck, where small specialty stations insure fairly short lines, and the variety of available items is surprisingly large. For breakfast there are the usual steam-table items -- your basic scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, and smoked salmon -- as well as bagels, hot and cold cereals. But there are also a variety of blintzes, an omelet station, and in the back by the Palm Springs Pool a fresh waffle station with fruit and whipped cream ... yum.

Lunchtimes in the Cafe offer a more varied daily menu, with theme lunches (Mexican, Italian, Asian), and a sandwich and salad station. My daughter and I always enjoyed our lunches there, and usually tried small bites of several entrees before deciding to go back for more of one of them. Our favorites? One was a pork dish -- some sort of stew -- on Mexico day. I have no idea if it was Mexican or not, but it was delicious. And we really enjoyed the surprisingly good Reubens from the sandwich bar. If, on any given day, there was little in the main buffet that appealed, we enjoyed the option of freshly baked pizza.

The food was good but we expected fantastic and so our disappointment, which was consistent throughout the meals onboard, was palpable. It isn't that we had a bad meal, but there was nothing on our eight-night cruise that made us swoon -- other than the bread and rolls.

Actually, there's another exception. On one of our lazy sea dayswe decided we weren't up for dressing up and so headed to the Palm Springs Cafe for sushi to take back to our cabin. The sushi chef behind the counter helped me put together two dishes with a variety of sushi and sashimi, a little dish of wasabi, and some ginger and soy sauce. The sushi was fresh and we loved it; we felt like royalty.  This we did swoon over, and to think that it is available every single night between 6 and 9 p.m. is just wondrous.

Room service is available 24 hours a day and offers a fairly large selection of both hot and cold items. We loved the fact that you could get hot items for breakfast. After the first day, when we ordered a hot breakfast to have in our cabin, we only ordered one to share because the portions are so huge. If we had wanted to, we could have selected from the dinner menu during the designated dining times and supped in our jammies too.

Hamburgers and grilled chicken sandwiches are available from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. at the pool, with accompaniments.  Late night snacks are available in the lounges; on one night during the cruise there is an elaborate gala of a midnight buffet.

Cabins

There are 935 cabins on Mercury, with 170 of the standard outsides featuring verandahs. Standard outside staterooms (with or without verandahhs) measure 172 square ft., but the space in our balconied cabin seemed smaller even though the 41 square ft. balcony is measured separately. In fact, my daughter and I left the convertible twin beds as a queen because when they are separated you have to climb over the end of the one closest to the seating area.

We finally decided that the way it was configured and the lack of usable surface space was what made the room seem smaller. There was just a ledge as a desk/vanity and a narrow opening above the fridge/safe cabinet. With the ledge holding the water carafe, ice bucket and drinking glasses; the shore excursion and ship's services brochures in a fairly large rack; and a vase of flowers that we brought onboard, there was no room for anything else (like a laptop, makeup or hair dryer). Although we liked the bedside lamps (preferable over wall-mounted reading lights), the demi-globe shades were low and wide, making it impossible to put anything on the little bedside tables taller than a couple of books and magazines.

Storage space is ample, although we found the drawer placement awkward.

All cabins come with a seating area (expanded in suites), a little table, a television, a telephone, a stocked fridge (check prices before you open anything) and a safe. Oceanview rooms in all categories also come with VCR's; a large tape library with complimentary rentals is available at the reception desk. The television also has an interactive feature, where you can check your account balance, select shore excursions and order a pay-per-view movie.

The bathrooms are proportionally large in Mercury's cabins, with great light, plenty of storage space, roomy showers and big luxurious towels. Toiletries in standard cabins consist of face soap, bath soap, a wall-mounted pump for lotion, and a pump in the shower for shampoo. Suite and concierge-level guests get a full array of bath products, including shampoo and lotion in bottles.

One other note about the verandahh cabins: Instead of a wall of glass as in most cabins of this type, there is a single glass door in the middle. I found this disconcerting at first and spent the first half of the cruise trying to open the drapes on either side of the opening to let in more light, feeling foolish when I was confronted with a wall behind the curtains.

There are 50 suites on Mercury, and 84 of the standard verandah cabins have been converted to Concierge Class, which provides butler service, evening hors d'oeuvres, priority tender and dining options and some cabin upgrades. The size of the cabins is the same as the premium oceanview category (balconies); however, cabins 1200 and 1201 on the Sky Deck have much larger verandahs.

Entertainment

No question, Celebrity offers a mostly traditional take on cruising and nowhere was it more "ye olde cruising" style than in Mercury's choices for entertainment. For me, just happy to relax with a book, a rare luxury, options were just fine. For my nearly 30-year-old daughter, however, the activities offered were a tad boring. Granted, our end-of-season repositioning cruise did attract an older crowd and there were few people her own age, but when I say that beyond spending time in the gym she took a class in napkin folding and tried out line dancing (she will not become a devotee of either, alas), well....

Admittedly, the weather was not conducive to sitting around the pool and that certainly did make a difference.

The casino, located midship so everyone can access it, is lively with a huge array of slot machines in almost all dominations. There are several table games, too, including blackjack, poker and craps, and a great bar with another backdrop of etched glass. (I won a nice little jackpot on a slot machine, which really came in handy when I returned home to discover that my car had been towed. I had just enough cash to retrieve it from the impound lot!).

The Celebrity Theatre was a great surprise to us, looking more like Carnegie Hall than a shipboard showroom, with totally unobstructed seating options on the main floor and balcony boxes on the two floors above. Most of the shows in the Celebrity Theatre are typical cruise fare, with a live orchestra and a troupe of players with the unimaginative name of "The Celebrity Singers and Dancers." The stage has a nifty video screen that can either embellish or distract from the performances. We really did enjoy some of the individual acts -- magicians, comedians and (since there are no Cirque du Soleil productions on Mercury) the "aerialist duo."

But much more than the production shows, we enjoyed the variety of musical offerings elsewhere on the ship. From the solo pianist and classical groups to the rock 'n' roll cover band, there was music, generally low-key, playing somewhere on the ship during the day and in the evenings.

At various times during the day there are dance lessons (line, swing and ballroom, for example), trivia contests, a first-run movie in the ship's cinema, golf putting contests, fun games (Pictionary, Brain Teasers and Charades), and napkin folding and arts and crafts classes. And, of course there are the usual bingo sessions and art auctions.

Celebrity is justifiably proud of its fantastic Discover Enrichment series of lectures and participatory classes; on our cruise we had a naturalist who discussed the life of sea mammals and global warming, and another who had a series of seminars about financial planning. Celebrity@Sea, the computer lab, presented classes in Photoshop photo editing ($20 a session) and other software use for both novices and experienced computer users.

One thing that I really liked is that Celebrity puts the daily schedule on a pull-out card when delivering the nightly newsletter, Celebrity Today. It's scored down the center for folding, making it easy to take along with you when you leave your cabin. Having it handy like that allows you to see what's going on at any given moment without having to rely on memory.

Fitness & Recreation

Water, water everywhere, and I do not speak solely of the sea. Mercury's Resort Deck has two large pools in the center, a smaller pool (covered by a retractable magradome) at the aft, and a large thalassotherapy pool forward, in the spa area. There's also a small children's pool on Vista Deck behind the Ship Mates Fun Factory.

Mercury's AquaSpa, administered by London's Steiner Leisure, is fairly large, with its dominant feature being the pool in its center, surrounded by chic chaises and soothing taupe marble. Unfortunately, use of the thalassotherapy pool is not complimentary on Mercury -- nor, inexplicably, are day passes available; we decided not to pay the $89 per person charge for a week's worth of use. The steam and sauna rooms are free, however.

There is a smallish gymnasium with fairly new equipment, a large aerobics room, and several treatment rooms for facials and massages. New to Mercury is Acupuncture at Sea, which was unveiled a few years ago on other ships; acupuncturists are licensed by the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine.

The golf cage on the Sunrise Deck got little use on our chilly voyage, but the jogging track did. What's nice is that since it isn't located above or adjacent to passenger cabins, it can be used at any time. Sunrise found several runners and power walkers getting ready for the day ahead, and I once saw a fairly senior gentleman jogging off his supper at about midnight.

Family

Mercury, for its age and size, has gone a long way toward ensuring that children of all ages (including teens, the hardest to please of all age groups) have plenty to do while onboard. The well-equipped, bright and cheerful Ship Mates Fun Factory is located at the aft of the Vista Deck, with its own pool for younger kids; a room reserved as a teen lounge is located all the way forward on the Sky Deck adjacent to both the Navigator's Club and the video game room, with a satellite Internet station thrown in for good measure.

Participation is free (staffed baby-sitting is available after hours with 24-hour notice; expect to pay between $8 and $10 an hour) and is broken down nicely into compatible age groups. Potty-trained children are welcomed from age 3 and join the Ship's Mates (3- to 6-year-olds). Cadets (7 - 9), Ensigns (10 - 12) and Admirals (13 - 17) make up the balance of the groups, with age-appropriate activities for each, and trained counselors in attendance. The youth staff is expanded during the ship's Alaska itineraries, which tend to attract more families.

Fellow Passengers

This ship is family-friendly but depending on the itinerary, its placid elegance naturally attracts a more mature, genteel crowd. Families with younger children would find the ship's size and accessibility ideal. Most guests on Mercury enjoy traditional cruising with formal nights and two seatings for dinner, and the genuine, warm pampering by the ship's staff.

Dress Code

During the day, dress is casual. In the evenings, attire becomes more important and people on Mercury tend to "dress up" to country club casual (pant suits for women, coats for men). There were two formal nights on our eight-night cruise, and three "informal" nights (ties for men, dresses or pant suits for women). Jeans, bathing suits, flipflops and cover-ups are never allowed in the Manhattan Restaurant; shorts are not allowed at dinnertime.

Gratuities

Mercury's gratuities are collected the old-fashioned way, with envelopes distributed for dolling out by the guest on the last evening aboard. The "recommended" amounts are fairly standard ($3.50 per day for the room steward and waiter, $2 per day for their assistants), but there is also an envelope for the "assistant head housekeeper" with a recommended tip amount of 50 cents per day. This was a first for us; we assume it's a floor supervisor with whom we had no contact. The passenger services crew works so hard, and is so friendly and accommodating, that we had no problem tipping well above the recommended amounts.

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