Celebrity Apex

Built at Chantiers de l'Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire, Apex is the second ship of the Edge class. She shares her hull with her older sister, Celebrity Edge: together they make up the short format of the family, the one that came before the stretch adopted for the ships that followed. But what sets her apart has less to do with her dimensions than with a design decision — handing the ship to designers and architects drawn mostly from architecture and hospitality, and accepting that some of those choices would divide people.

Four dining rooms, one galley

Included dinner plays out across four main dining rooms, each with its own identity: Cosmopolitan for American cooking with international leanings, Normandie for the French table, Tuscan for Italy, Cyprus as a nod to Celebrity's Greek roots — the X in the company's logo is in fact the Greek letter chi, a wink at the founding Chandris family.

Every menu works on three levels: dishes belonging to that room alone, served nightly; classics shared across all four, equally fixed; and a rotating Celebrity signature selection that changes each evening and is identical everywhere. You can dine whenever you like between 5:30 and 9 p.m., or book one of the two set seatings. A pager system manages the after-show rush, with waits that rarely exceed 15 to 20 minutes — except on the first night and on dress-up evenings, when service runs flat out.

All four rooms in fact share the same galley, each served from a different end of it. A little-known consequence: you can order a dish from another room's menu without paying extra — just ask your server, including from Blu, the restaurant reserved for AquaClass guests. Simply allow a little more patience: your plate is coming from further away.

The evening bars, each in its own register

The ship's nightlife spreads across several addresses: the Martini Bar carries most of the live music, the Sunset Bar looks out over the stern, and Craft Social leans squarely into the pub register — more than forty craft beers, wines on tap, cocktails, and a menu of comfort dishes ordered à la carte, with nothing set in stone.

A ship drawn by architects and hoteliers

What really sets the Edge class apart is the team that drew her. Celebrity handed the project to designers and architects drawn mostly from architecture and hospitality, which remains rare in the industry. Kelly Hoppen took on the staterooms and suites. Tom Wright, the architect behind Dubai's Burj Al Arab, designed the outdoor decks and the hull profile — he's also the mind behind the Magic Carpet. Paris studio Jouin Manku signed the Grand Plaza, the atrium and the staircases, where a brass reading of Foucault's pendulum hangs through three levels. Patricia Urquiola took the aft spaces, including the Cyprus restaurant and Eden, spread over three decks. Nate Berkus serves as design ambassador for the whole Edge series, and even the theatre has an author: Scott Butler.

The furniture and the wall pieces strike almost every visitor, unprompted, within the first few steps aboard. One detail, though, works the other way round, and it's worth the look. Across the ships of the class, angled panels dress the internal structure of deck 3 to conceal it — but the assembly leaves, between them, a glimpse of bare metal, steel still carrying the shipyard's markings. You'll find it on the starboard side, in the corridor running from the Guest Relations area toward Tuscan Grill. The whole thing reads almost like an installation, and nothing flags it: most passengers pass by without seeing it.

“Celebrity Apex was designed to be noticed — and built, all the same, so that you don't see everything at once.”

Selvague

A word here for the curious: ships of the same class share most of their design, and a good deal of what holds true for Apex holds true for her sisters as well. If you're weighing several of them against each other, or simply want to understand the logic of the Edge class better, the write-ups on Celebrity Beyond and Celebrity Ascent — like the one on Edge herself — carry a lot that transfers from one ship to the next.

The Magic Carpet, a platform with four lives

You can't talk about the design of Apex without stopping at the Magic Carpet: a cantilevered glass platform, orange, weighing about 90 tonnes, fixed to her starboard side. It travels from deck 2 to deck 16, up to the equivalent of thirteen storeys above the sea, and changes function depending on where it stops. At deck 2, it becomes the boarding platform for tenders at anchor ports. At deck 5, it turns into a terrace extension of Raw on 5 in the evening — and closes, in passing, the loop of the outdoor promenade, otherwise interrupted by that same restaurant. At deck 14, it extends the pool deck in front of the cabanas, with a bar and live music. A crew member oversees every one of its moves, which are never made with guests aboard.

The open decks, between crowds and refuges

The solarium on deck 14 is adults-only and glass-roofed, with its own heated indoor pool. It's the most sought-after refuge on the ship in cool weather and warm alike — and that popularity has a very concrete effect on how you plan your mornings. It fills up far earlier than you'd expect: the flow starts at seven or half past, and by eight the seats are taken. Guests who care about a lounger tend to arrive in pairs, one going ahead to scout while the other follows. One explanation has been put forward, specific to this ship: Infinite Veranda staterooms give you no private outdoor space, and what guests can't find in their cabin they go looking for on the decks. Nothing proves it outright, but the theory fits what you see elsewhere aboard.

The pool deck comes under the same pressure at the best hours. One level up, the logic reverses.

The staterooms and the veranda that changes everything

Most balcony staterooms aboard are Infinite Verandas: a motorised glass wall that opens wide, rather than a true open-air balcony. Conventional balconies do exist, but they stay rare on this ship — and where they appear, they're recessed balconies, set back from the hull, which makes them quieter but also partly enclosed, with a partly obstructed view in some cases.

The Infinite Veranda concept is genuinely divisive, and the company itself has acknowledged as much publicly — a rare admission from a builder discussing its own ship. The testimony says nothing different: no consensus, two clearly drawn camps. Those who like it point to the unbroken view, floor to ceiling; those who distrust it miss having open air all the time. Here's what a morning in one of those staterooms actually feels like.

Morning, behind the glass

Morning announces itself through the light, before you've even opened your eyes. In your Infinite Veranda stateroom, the glass rises from floor to ceiling, no curtain, no partition — an entire wall turned toward the sea.

You want air. The button has to be held down: the upper half of the glass lowers slowly, never in a hurry, and you keep your hand on it while it happens — half a wall of glass doesn't vanish in a blink. The air comes in over the top, all at once, still carrying salt. The air conditioning has already cut itself off, from the first few centimetres.

The floor here isn't carpeted: linoleum, meant for the rain that might invite itself in when the sea gets up. The railing stands higher than a conventional one, chest height, and you lean on it to watch the water go by, still grey at this hour.

Further down the corridor, a service trolley creaks softly along — someone is already getting the day started. Low voices pass the door, then fade. The ship moves without a jolt, that faint roll you stop noticing after the first day at sea.

You raise the glass again before the air turns cold, go back to sit on the bed, and let the stateroom — this veranda that isn't quite one — do the rest of the work.

On categories, the two accounts that come up most often describe opposite experiences with AquaClass: one couple finds the comparison with a Retreat suite decisive enough in AquaClass's favour never to look higher; another, after several nights, wouldn't book it again, judging the ship's other restaurants good enough to do without Blu, the restaurant reserved for that category. Both views are sincere — mostly they tell you the choice depends on what you're after, not on any objective consensus about the category itself.

Le Grand Bistro and its morning counter

On deck 4, across from Café al Bacio, Le Grand Bistro serves French cooking in the evening, with a nightly change of register: the restaurant becomes Le Petit Chef, a dinner-with-animation where the story is projected directly onto your table. At midday the menu changes completely and turns to burgers, in a service distinct from the evening one.

The counter at the front of Le Grand Bistro also offers pastries and fresh bread during the day — included in your cruise fare rather than charged separately, and staff will happily box them up to take away if you ask. Few passengers, even among regulars on this ship, know the counter is there.

The rest of the included table

The buffet, Ocean View Cafe, is one of the strengths most often singled out in the testimony: separated stations that keep queues down, an Indian counter that draws particular praise, fresh pasta, meats carved to order, and a theme that follows the day's port. Mast Grill serves burgers and hot dogs by the pool, with one notable touch: it will make a gluten-free burger on request, in a few minutes. Spa Cafe, tucked away on deck 14, serves the included coffee most often called the best aboard, freshly ground, but on strict hours: paired with the included pastries at Café al Bacio, it makes a good breakfast possible without ever stepping outside the base fare.

Fine Cut and Eden, the paid pair

Fine Cut Steakhouse remains the hardest call on the ship: several serious, detailed accounts describe uneven consistency, with the same guests reporting disappointing visits and excellent meals. This isn't a matter of individual bad luck — it's a fact to take as it stands, without smoothing it in either direction. The chilled lobster salad and the wedge salad with bacon and blue cheese, on the other hand, come back as reliable choices whatever the evening.

Eden plays a different register: a seven-course tasting menu, originally conceived to fit around an evening at the theatre, now stretched to roughly three and a half hours — a tension the restaurant lives with rather than resolves. You can still build your own selection à la carte with your server, without committing to the full menu. The signature risotto comes back as one of the best dishes aboard in most accounts.

On the sound level at Eden, one clarification matters: the music was long considered too loud, to the point that the ship eventually turned the volume down after repeated guest feedback. That's a setting, not a fixed feature of the restaurant — any account of noise at Eden holds for a specific moment, not as a permanent truth. Another, more down-to-earth point: where you sit changes the experience, between the tables near the galley, quieter in the evening, and those along the windows, facing the wake.

The Retreat and its butler

Reserved for suite guests, The Retreat brings together a lounge on deck 15, a private sundeck on deck 16 with pool and hot tubs, and the Luminae restaurant. The butler — renamed “personal retreat host” in the company's current vocabulary — remains one of the most misunderstood services aboard. Several suite guests describe the same experience: they had almost nothing to ask of them all week. That isn't a sign the role is useless, but a misunderstanding of what it's for: it's at the shore excursions desk, at guest relations, or in rescheduling a restaurant booking that this service really earns its keep — not in restocking the minibar day to day.

The quality of Retreat embarkation depends heavily on the port: accounts point to Fort Lauderdale as the smoothest and Miami as noticeably slower, while Southampton and Port Canaveral both come across as efficient.

Practical life aboard

Onboard Wi-Fi runs on a new-generation satellite link, with bandwidth deliberately capped by the company. Opinions on it long seemed to contradict each other — some finding it excellent, others frankly disappointing. Dig in and the explanation fits in a sentence: the base package handles email and messaging perfectly well, while video calls or streaming need the upper tier. Those are two different uses, not two different ships. Hold on to the mechanism rather than the thresholds: it's your package level that determines what you'll be able to do, and that balance gets readjusted from season to season.

The Celebrity app pulls together the daily programme, restaurant menus and control of certain stateroom fittings; better to download it before you reach the terminal, since the cellular network there is often saturated on days when several ships board at once. The daily printed paper, Celebrity Today, is delivered to your stateroom alongside it.

A settled atmosphere, built for adults

Apex positions herself squarely on design, food and destination: she isn't a ship built around thrill attractions, and she doesn't try to be. Several converging accounts, including from very experienced cruisers, describe a settled ship, geared toward unwinding, with a noticeably older crowd outside school holidays. That atmosphere isn't a fixed property of the ship, though: it varies a great deal with the calendar — more families during school holidays, a more senior crowd in the low season.

Bar service illustrates why that caution is needed: one observation from February, in a quiet period, describes servers circulating without your having to ask; another, over a busy Thanksgiving, describes a bar where you had to go up yourself to be served. It's hard to say which is more representative — both are true, each in its moment.

Where Celebrity Apex sails

Celebrity Apex lives by a seasonal swing, like most ships in her category. Summer is spent in Northern Europe, out of Southampton: Norwegian fjords and the Arctic Circle, the Baltic, the British Isles, and forays further south toward Portugal, the Canaries and the Mediterranean. Come autumn, she crosses the Atlantic on repositioning — a crossing that is a product in its own right, with its sea days and its programme of talks. Winter plays out in Florida and the Caribbean, on week-long formats to Key West, the Bahamas and the Antilles. She also spent her first seasons in the eastern Mediterranean, sailing from Athens.

That swing is stable in principle, but home ports and calls are replanned every year: always check the exact itinerary for the season you're interested in.