Just Back from the Splendor "Isles of Legacy & Legend" -- June 9-21, 2024

[Navis]

Hello all, we are just back from this 12 night Southampton rt cruise stopping all around there UK and Ireland.I'm planning to do a more complete review when I have the time, but thought I would provide some high level thoughts now and answer any questions anyone has on either the ship or the itinerary or really anything!  I got so much out of this Board over the past 18 months while planning our trip I want to give back in any way I can!

 

Overall, we had an enjoyable vacation!  Some places where Regent really excelled for us:

 

1.  The people!  Wow, I do not know that I have met a more friendly, helpful, and hard working group of people in my life!  They all seemed to be working all day and night and always with a smile on their faces and a cheery "hello!" In so many ways these people really helped make up for the shortcomings we identify and discuss below.

 

2. The cabin.  Our cabin was a mid ship grand suite ... it was absolutely wonderful! Very smartly laid out, plenty of space and expertly appointed and maintained with a wonderful butler and housekeeping team!

 

3.  Dinner Options (generally).  Overall, we found the dinners (speciality and compass rose) to be exceptional.  Every dinner in compass rose was memorable and quite well done.  Same for the speciality restaurants, with the exception of our first visit to Prime 7 (asked for my steak medium and it arrived rawer than rare!) and pacific rim (where there was actual sand in my partner's crab appetizer).  To their credit, Prime 7 turned it around the second visit, but we never gave Pacific Rim a second chance.  We took full advantage of our ability to eat at a speciality whenever we wanted and were accommodated at our requested times ... we ended up eating at Prime 7 two times, Chartreuse 3 times, Seti Mari 3 times and the rest at compass rose.

 

4.  Culinary Arts Kitchen.  Loved, loved, loved this!  We had a wonderful afternoon! As others have mentioned, it is a pretty basic class, but was very enjoyable.

 

There were, however, a number of things that did detract from our overall experience:

 

1. Itinerary accuracy.  This was an annoyance for us, but I know for others that had made private arrangements this was a big issue.  For 18 months prior, the itinerary was rock solid consistent ... it never changed ... port arrivals/departures ... dock vs tender .. etc always the same.  However, when we arrived in our cabin the Passages had a reproduced copy of the entire itinerary with many arrival and departure times changed and all different tender ports.  Clearly Regent knew this months ago, why not update passengers?  Just a dropped ball?

 

2.  Breakfast.  OK, let's just say it . . . shockingly bad for a luxury cruise line!  We tried room service two times .. ice cold.  We tried compass rose 3 times ... took forever and again, ice cold.  The only acceptable option was the buffet, which we always avoid on cruise lines, but it was the only way to get anything approaching hot.  We never understood it .. dinners were wonderful, but they just could not pull a proper breakfast together.  We both said the breakfast offered in the Haven Restaurant on NCL was far superior to anything offered on Regent.

 

3. Excursions.  We did really enjoy a number of the excursions (Edinburgh and Dublin standout for us), but taking the experience as a whole we did just not feel like the excursion team lived up to the standard of the rest of the ship.  Complete lack of communication day of, or worse inaccurate information, lack of coordination almost always led to delays/confusion/anger among passengers.  What was really annoying was the incompetence resulted in significant delays in start times with no adjustment on the back end.  So we ended up being rushed the entire time or had parts of the excursion just cut off. Like many others, we also felt their obvious lack of interest in passenger satisfaction quite shocking when compared to the rest of the crew. Toward the end we began to question whether included excursions is actually a good thing as in practice it does not seem to live up to the Regent standard.

 

4.  Inconsistency. This one is a hard one to explain, but we felt like from location to location and time of day the product quality and service level was very inconsistent. It was not a huge detractor for us on its own, but for a luxury cruise line we just expected more consistency overall.  What I think this might be tied to is our biggest observation overall ... this ship seems very obviously understaffed and I think they all just scrambling to do their best.  Whether it was an inability accommodate a rush at Compass Rose after a show or the fact that EVERY speciality restaurant was only seating to 75% capacity all 12 nights, or having ONE bartender in Meriden lounge at cocktail hour and ONE bartender to serve the Splendor Lounge and the entire Compass Rose it was obvious that they are thin on staff .. and we passengers noticed it.  The bartender in Meriden literally was making drinks non-stop for 75 minutes .. no help came.  It was like this every night at cocktail hour and no adjustments were made or another bartender sent in to help out.

 

I don't want any of this to give the impression that we did not have a good time because we did and we would consider Regent for our future cruises, but I would have to be honest and say they did come up a little short of what we had expected.  Now, maybe our expectations were unreasonable, but given the price we paid I'm just not convinced the value was there ... at least for what we paid for our suite category.

Happy to answer any questions anyone has 🙂   

[sasejm]

53 minutes ago, Navis said:

Hello all, we are just back from this 12 night Southampton rt cruise stopping all around there UK and Ireland.I'm planning to do a more complete review when I have the time, but thought I would provide some high level thoughts now and answer any questions anyone has on either the ship or the itinerary or really anything!  I got so much out of this Board over the past 18 months while planning our trip I want to give back in any way I can!

 

Overall, we had an enjoyable vacation!  Some places where Regent really excelled for us:

 

1.  The people!  Wow, I do not know that I have met a more friendly, helpful, and hard working group of people in my life!  They all seemed to be working all day and night and always with a smile on their faces and a cheery "hello!" In so many ways these people really helped make up for the shortcomings we identify and discuss below.

 

2. The cabin.  Our cabin was a mid ship grand suite ... it was absolutely wonderful! Very smartly laid out, plenty of space and expertly appointed and maintained with a wonderful butler and housekeeping team!

 

3.  Dinner Options (generally).  Overall, we found the dinners (speciality and compass rose) to be exceptional.  Every dinner in compass rose was memorable and quite well done.  Same for the speciality restaurants, with the exception of our first visit to Prime 7 (asked for my steak medium and it arrived rawer than rare!) and pacific rim (where there was actual sand in my partner's crab appetizer).  To their credit, Prime 7 turned it around the second visit, but we never gave Pacific Rim a second chance.  We took full advantage of our ability to eat at a speciality whenever we wanted and were accommodated at our requested times ... we ended up eating at Prime 7 two times, Chartreuse 3 times, Seti Mari 3 times and the rest at compass rose.

 

4.  Culinary Arts Kitchen.  Loved, loved, loved this!  We had a wonderful afternoon! As others have mentioned, it is a pretty basic class, but was very enjoyable.

 

There were, however, a number of things that did detract from our overall experience:

 

1. Itinerary accuracy.  This was an annoyance for us, but I know for others that had made private arrangements this was a big issue.  For 18 months prior, the itinerary was rock solid consistent ... it never changed ... port arrivals/departures ... dock vs tender .. etc always the same.  However, when we arrived in our cabin the Passages had a reproduced copy of the entire itinerary with many arrival and departure times changed and all different tender ports.  Clearly Regent knew this months ago, why not update passengers?  Just a dropped ball?

 

2.  Breakfast.  OK, let's just say it . . . shockingly bad for a luxury cruise line!  We tried room service two times .. ice cold.  We tried compass rose 3 times ... took forever and again, ice cold.  The only acceptable option was the buffet, which we always avoid on cruise lines, but it was the only way to get anything approaching hot.  We never understood it .. dinners were wonderful, but they just could not pull a proper breakfast together.  We both said the breakfast offered in the Haven Restaurant on NCL was far superior to anything offered on Regent.

 

3. Excursions.  We did really enjoy a number of the excursions (Edinburgh and Dublin standout for us), but taking the experience as a whole we did just not feel like the excursion team lived up to the standard of the rest of the ship.  Complete lack of communication day of, or worse inaccurate information, lack of coordination almost always led to delays/confusion/anger among passengers.  What was really annoying was the incompetence resulted in significant delays in start times with no adjustment on the back end.  So we ended up being rushed the entire time or had parts of the excursion just cut off. Like many others, we also felt their obvious lack of interest in passenger satisfaction quite shocking when compared to the rest of the crew. Toward the end we began to question whether included excursions is actually a good thing as in practice it does not seem to live up to the Regent standard.

 

4.  Inconsistency. This one is a hard one to explain, but we felt like from location to location and time of day the product quality and service level was very inconsistent. It was not a huge detractor for us on its own, but for a luxury cruise line we just expected more consistency overall.  What I think this might be tied to is our biggest observation overall ... this ship seems very obviously understaffed and I think they all just scrambling to do their best.  Whether it was an inability accommodate a rush at Compass Rose after a show or the fact that EVERY speciality restaurant was only seating to 75% capacity all 12 nights, or having ONE bartender in Meriden lounge at cocktail hour and ONE bartender to serve the Splendor Lounge and the entire Compass Rose it was obvious that they are thin on staff .. and we passengers noticed it.  The bartender in Meriden literally was making drinks non-stop for 75 minutes .. no help came.  It was like this every night at cocktail hour and no adjustments were made or another bartender sent in to help out.

 

I don't want any of this to give the impression that we did not have a good time because we did and we would consider Regent for our future cruises, but I would have to be honest and say they did come up a little short of what we had expected.  Now, maybe our expectations were unreasonable, but given the price we paid I'm just not convinced the value was there ... at least for what we paid for our suite category.

Happy to answer any questions anyone has 🙂   

Do they have the Starlink internet installed and active on the Splendor? We were on the Splendor in April and were told it wouldn’t be connected until December, and then we heard June.

[Navis]

10 hours ago, sasejm said:

Do they have the Starlink internet installed and active on the Splendor? We were on the Splendor in April and were told it wouldn’t be connected until December, and then we heard June.

No Starlink, but I have to say both of us experienced zero issues with the ship's wifi.  I was able to check emails, make phone calls, surf the web, etc with no interruption of service at all.  That could be predominately a function of our cruise in that we hugged the coast of the UK and Ireland the entire time and never really crossed any open sea.

[carolina cruisin]

Navis - Sorry you had issues with breakfast - and a bit surprised.  While I am not opposed to buffets, we do tend to order our eggs from the "made to order" station. Have never experienced them being delivered cold.  Hope this is not a growing occurrence.

[sasejm]

2 hours ago, Navis said:

No Starlink, but I have to say both of us experienced zero issues with the ship's wifi.  I was able to check emails, make phone calls, surf the web, etc with no interruption of service at all.  That could be predominately a function of our cruise in that we hugged the coast of the UK and Ireland the entire time and never really crossed any open sea.

 

I think so because we were on the transatlantic cruise, and it was spotty at best.

[Mystictraveler]

Thanks for your review. I would just like to add further to your comments about breakfast. In a word, I find it "boring". The thin slices of ham they serve look they were sliced from a can of Hormel and the hash browns must come from the McDonald's vendor. The pancakes were anything but "light and fluffy". We did a TA on the Splendor in 2023 and I decided it was much better to eat a light (and sometimes unhealthy) breakfast in order to enjoy lunch where there was always a variety.

[Kwaj girl]

Navis - I'm surprised about your room service breakfast being cold - this should be under control of your butler as he/she is the one who arranges and delivers your meal.  No matter the ship, our butler has always brought our breakfast HOT and freshly prepared.

[ifitfloats]

We are on this cruise, mostly the same, next June on Grandeur. Looking forward to your full review. 

[flossie009]

On 6/25/2024 at 4:14 AM, Navis said:

We tried room service two times .. ice cold.  We tried compass rose 3 times ... took forever and again, ice cold.

I trust you complained and sent the dishes back to be replaced with something hot.

 

[mj_holiday]

Our last cruise, I also started ordering eggs "Made to Order" and the food was always delivered hot, with a hot plate.  One other thing I would do for warm food, was make sure I picked up a warm plate. (On our previous cruise I had also had mostly cold breakfast food that was meant to be warm/hot)

[shuguley]

Which tour of Edinburgh did you take?  We will be there in September.

[Donyb]

Navis- Thank you for your review. We were on the Splendor T.A. this spring and are scheduled again next month for Iceland, Norway etc. Everything you said in your review was pretty much spot on for us this spring.  We especially found the excursions desk personnel and excursions to be really disappointing. Like you, our itinerary was changed on the day we embarked. It was T.A. but we ended up with 8 days at sea to get to Europe. We also had a medical incident which required a deviation in the Azores. However, the deviation from FL did give us mostly calm seas on the crossing which was welcomed! We are hopeful that our next cruise will be as good or better in all areas.