First Cruise After Dry Dock

[Gardyloo2]

I could be jumping the gun a bit, but we're thinking of taking the first cruise after a month-long dry dock on the Century next March.

 

Could other CC'ers tell us about their experiences with a post dry dock cruise? I'm assuming the beds will be *new*, but was it well stocked? Is it the same crew and will the ship still be a mess?

[scanditaly]

Cl, you raise some excellent issues. There have been threads/posts about this. An experienced computer user might post them here, but you can also search for them.

 

As for the 5 April, 2014; we will be there!!!!

[trabeler]

Personally, I'd avoid the first cruise after a drydock. All of the work is never finished and it will continue through the first cruise. In addition, there will be a fair amount of crew turnover since they will take the long drydock opportunity to cycle out staff. There will also be some adjustments to be made on all the new facilities.

 

We did a Summit sailing immediately after drydock and there were still construction workers finishing up things, people changing out signs, plus piles of material on some of the open decks. We still had a good cruise, but the crew and ship didn't seem as "polished" as usual.

[Project_gal]

Personally, I would always avoid such a cruise. It is the difference between "Cutting Edge" and "Bloody Edge" - Cutting-Edge is good but, too early, and it is the Bloody-Edge.

 

We had booked our Infinity post-dry-dock cruise long before the dry-dock was announced. We still had a year to prepare ourselves for a less than perfect cruise but the experience was a great deal worse than we expected. However, Celebrity admitted to us afterwards that it had been handled badly.

 

Hopefully, Celebrity learn something from each experience but, to give you some idea of the sort of problems you may encounter, some of the things that happened on our cruise were:

1. Delay in embarkation handled very poorly by Celebrity even though we had booked our pre-cruise hotel and transfers through Celebrity. Expect confusion, lack of information and delays.
   
2. Work still continuing in many areas. Areas of the ship out of bounds.
   
3. Things not working properly [eg none of the clocks on board].
   
4. Consequential problems in areas not actually affected by the work [eg the addition of Blu below our suite affecting all the doors in our suite - the main door would not stay shut, getting stuck in the bathroom because the door would not open, etc].
   
5. Lack of visibility of officers and crew because they are "fire-fighting" in the background. This, for example, results in the normal issues you will encounter on any cruise not being fixed because no one is available to deal with them.
   
6. Many items unavailable because they are still in storage but the crew are not sure where.
   

We still had a great cruise because we met up with a great group of people [thank goodness for Cruise Critic Roll Calls] but it would have been much better without all the issues.

 

Sue

[Keith1010]

I would avoid the first cruise after the post dock if a lot of work is involved because often it is either not all finished or they have been down to the wire.

 

Keith