Steve Napier
Age: 50
Occupation:Supervisor
Number of Cruises: 3
Cruise Line: Celebrity
Ship: Mercury
Sailing Date: n/a
Itinerary: Mexican Riviera
Celebrity
Mercury
Mexican Riviera
Steve Napier
Overview:
We planned this cruise to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We were not
disappointed on the whole but I will note some small issues as I write this
review.
Ship:
Mercury is a beautiful ship, but after cruising on Brilliance of the Seas in the
meantime, it is a little dated even though it was commissioned in 1997. Deck
space was a little sparse, especially on sea days when pool usage was at a peak.
Mercury does have an awesome AquaSpa with a thalassotherapy pool that was
incredible. We enjoyed this tremendously.
Dining:
The dining options were just OK even though the food in the main dining room was
great. There are only a couple of places to get lunch outside of the dining room
(who wants to dress for lunch?) and the buffet which was a little limiting
unless you like buffet style, or hot dogs, hamburgers, and pizza. Brilliance has
many options for lunch and dinner which we found more to our liking overall.
Service:
Just fantastic! We loved our butler in our Sky Suite, Joeseph. Our waiter at
dinner Osaun, was alos great and we got to be friends (as much as you can be on
a cruise) with both. They both seemed to appreciate that we enjoyed their
service and did not gripe or complain as they mentioned about 80% of the
passengers do. I do not recall our cabin attendants name as she was so
unobtrusive and kept our room so clean we hardly ever saw her.
Ports:
I will not go into detail for each port but we enjoyed Cabo, Puerto Vallarta and
Zihuatanejo/Ixtapa the best. Mazatlan and Manzanillo are very poor areas. There
were such differences in the cities based on what kind of resort area it was.
Cabo and PV get a lot of other tourists beside cruise ships which raises the
standard of living appreciably. Acapulco was OK though the area where the port
is located is a very poor area with skinny dying dogs laying around on the
street and sales people following you around for blocks trying to get your
money.
Entertainment:
Just so so as on any other cruise line. A great comic on night 4 but the only
broadway style show that was worth seeing was the 10th night (I believe) and it
was not very memorable. Lot's of activities, but the cruise director was not
very friendly after I tried to talk with him one night after he had MC'ed a
trivia game.
Overall:
A pretty great cruise over all. I would give the entire cruise a 4 star rating
out of 5. Service and food was much better than any other cruise line we have
been on but as I stated, Mercury is already a little dated. We would sail on
Celebrity again in a minute, we would just pick one of the newer Millenium class
ships. We were very excited to hear of the two new 117,000GT ships, the first of
which will debut in 2007.