Cruise Review: Celebrity Mercury, Oct. 6, 2006 3 nights Pacific Northwest Sailing from Seattle

This was cruise number 42 for me, and my second sailing on the Mercury.

Check-in was very easy. We arrived at the pier a little before 2PM and only had carry on bags. There was very little wait, and we were checked in within a couple of minutes. The boarding ramp deposited us right onto the Promenade deck and we were handed glasses of sparkling wine even before we had our photos taken for our seapass card. A white gloved steward took both of our rollaboard bags and led us to our cabin.

We had cabin 1201, a Concierge Class cabin on the Sky Deck. It is one of only four CC cabins on that deck, and one of two with the full, extra large balcony. The cabin itself was a good size, 172 square feet, very functional, and had a decent amount of storage space. Concierge Class includes daily flowers, upgraded towels and toiletries, a room service menu that includes a full breakfast (instead of just a cold one) and extra thick bathrobes just to name a few items. Supposedly there is a "pillow menu" but we never saw it. All in all, we really liked this cabin and its location.

The Mercury is just about 9 years old, and was in fairly good shape. I smelled fresh paint and varnish a couple of times and the furnishings we saw looked fine. She is a little over 77,000 tons which when she was built was one of the largest ships around, now she is considered mid-size. That was actually one of the things we really liked, it was very easy to get around without long walks to get to the far reaches of the ship. The Manhattan Restaurant, which is the main dining room on the Mercury looks beautiful and is one of the visual highlights of the ship.

The service that we experienced on this cruise was excellent. Our cabin steward did a great job of cleaning the cabin, keeping the ice bucket filled, and would open our door for us if he saw us approaching in the hall. Our food service team was also top notch with our waiter moving our courses at a perfect pace, and our assistant waiter memorizing all of the table’s preferences including making sure that the lemons my wife liked for here salad were on the table before we got there.

As you know, food on board is a very subjective topic. My wife and I have a different opinion on Celebrity’s food in the main dining room. She would like to see Michel Roux fired as the menu designer in the main dining room, while I really like the food. To be fair, she does have serious allergies, but Celebrity seems to have a problem making her food which meets her allergy needs (she ends up eating something plain from the always available menu) that taste good, and are not too dry or too mushy, etc. This is not a problem that she has with other cruise lines. On the other hand, she loved the sushi bar and thought they did a wonderful job. The Mercury does not have a Specialty Dining restaurant on board.

Even though this was a short cruise, I still managed one visit to the spa to get a hot stones treatment. As usual, Celebrity did a great job in the spa.

We had two port calls on this cruise, Vancouver and Nanaimo, B.C. We did not take an organized excursion in either city, instead just walked around in both. We had an exceptionally beautiful sunny autumn day in Vancouver and ended up taking a long walk from the pier at Canada Place to Stanley Park and back. Our day in Nanaimo started out rainy in the morning, but the sun came out in the afternoon while we visited local shops as well as the local casino (we didn’t win here, but as you’ll see it didn’t matter in the end). Nanaimo is a tender port, and the tender service was very efficient.

In a rare move for us, we did not see any of the shows on board. I was on another Celebrity cruise only a few weeks earlier, and the main show was the same. We did enjoy the musicians around the ship and went to the movie theatre for a film one night. Since we didn’t take in the evening show, we did make a point of visiting the casino each night. This happened to be my wife’s birthday cruise, and she always wins in the casino during her birthday cruises. Always. We just have to be on board a ship on her birthday. The first two nights our money went fast, but the night of her birthday, neither of us could lose. We both hit a couple of jackpots on quarter machines, so feeling lucky, I went to the craps table and won a good amount there. I figured that was it for the night and went to play a nickel machine and hit another jackpot. We won enough to pay our on board bill as well as take a nice sum home. There is no better feeling on the last morning of your cruise to get a bill with a zero balance when you know you spent a good amount.

We thought that debarkation was handled well. We opted for the "carry your own luggage off the ship" debarkation and were off the ship a few minutes after 8AM and in the middle of I-5 Seattle traffic a few minutes later.

All in all we had a very nice cruise experience. Three days never seems like enough time, but it makes a great break from the every day. Celebrity only offers these short cruises from Seattle for a few weeks each fall, and we would love to try it again, food issues not withstanding. We rate the cruise a solid 8.