Celebrity Eclipse

There are two ways to tell this ship, and both are true. The first says you are looked after here as nowhere else, that the crew knows you by the third night. The second says you sleep in a cabin a generation behind, and nobody argues otherwise.

Both describe the same ship. It all comes down to one question, and we won't answer it for you: does unrenovated bother you?

What time skipped

Between 2018 and 2023, Celebrity took her fleet apart and put it back together under a programme called Revolution: cabins, bathrooms, public rooms. Equinox had hers in 2019, Celebrity Silhouette in February 2020. Eclipse was to follow on April 1, 2020 — then the date moved to October, then to March 2021, then it was gone. What she did get, in 2021, was paint: Celebrity's historic white hull went dark blue. A hull, and nothing behind it.

It took until April 2025 and three weeks at the Damen yard in Brest for a genuine refresh, if a light one: ten new inside cabins on decks 6, 9 and 12, a Retreat Lounge on deck 5, a Retreat Solarium on deck 16, new carpet, furniture and fabrics. Back in service on April 27. What Brest left alone still shows: bathrooms, televisions, cabin lighting.

A month later, Celebrity announced a separate programme to modernise the whole Solstice class. Solstice went first; Eclipse is expected in 2027 or later — no date has been announced.

One more thing colours everything else: she is not a short-turnaround ship. Alaska, Hawaii, Australia, Patagonia, Antarctica, transatlantics in both directions. Nobody boards her for three nights, and that changes the crowd as much as the rhythm.

Deck 15

Right at the top, amidships, there is grass. Real grass, mown, kept like a bowling green, and you can sit on it, walk it barefoot, play a round of boules. This is the Lawn Club, the visual signature of the Solstice class; after dark a cinema screen lights up over the lawn.

Next to it, a glass box holds a furnace and a handful of craftsmen: the Hot Glass Class, live glassblowing at sea, bleachers and all. You stop for five minutes on your way past and stay forty.

The cabin

This is where she shows her age, and she doesn't hide it. Fabrics, furniture and carpet were renewed at Brest and you notice at first glance. But the bones are 2010: televisions from another decade, lighting too weak to get ready by, and an eight-to-ten-centimetre lip at the bathroom door that everybody catches once. The shower draws no complaints at all — curved sliding door, no curtain to stick to you.

The daily subject is storage. Five drawers in the dresser: fine over seven nights, tight on a crossing. There is a reserve most people never find, though — above the bed, on both sides, closed lockers that open. Solstice regulars tell of finding them only after several cruises.

A word on AquaClass

AquaClass is the ship's spa category, and the one most argued over at the booking stage.

Twenty past five in the afternoon

It's 5:20 in the afternoon. You're all the way aft on deck 15, at the Sunset Bar. There are two ways in: across the Lawn Club grass from the deck 15 lifts, or up the stairs from the Ocean View Bar terrace one deck below. Either way, you have to mean to come here.

In front of you there is nothing. No pool, no screen, nothing asking for your attention. The wake opens out in a fan across the whole width of the stern and closes again, slowly, into the blue. The wind is warm and steady and smells of hot salt.

At this hour the bar has a crowd. Two or three people are waiting at the counter, and the wait takes what it takes. Nobody is really impatient. Around you the stern belongs to the people who have adopted it: the good chairs on either side of the lawn went long ago, a card game has been left out on a table, and several are doing nothing at all. A duo plays quietly, not pushing.

At the next table someone has laid a book face down and hasn't picked it up again. This is one of the busiest places on the ship, and still everyone speaks low. Over a long run of sea days you'll come back at different hours and find it packed one time and deserted the next.

This is the hour when she stops being a hotel and goes back to being a ship.

At the table

Moonlight Sonata, the main dining room, runs over two levels joined by a staircase, with a glass wine tower rising floor to ceiling at the centre and orienting the whole room. Assigned seating or open dining, as you prefer; the pace is surprisingly calm for a ship this size.

The Oceanview Café splits opinion sharply. Laid out in islands rather than one long line, with themed evenings, systematic labelling for dietary needs and pizza made to order, it delights some and leaves others cold — only the service at the buffet bar is unanimous. Same split at Tuscan Grille, the specialty Italian restaurant, where only the fresh house pasta and the flatbreads settle the argument.

Bars and lounges

Café al Bacio, in the heart of the ship, gets adopted before you've decided anything: table service, pastries and small bites included, and a constant parade that makes it the best indoor observation post aboard. Fortunes Casino is entirely smoke-free, the argument Celebrity regulars put ahead of every other. It only opens at sea, and one side gives onto the shopping arcade, which spares it the sealed-box feeling of windowless casinos. Its bar, sport on the screens, is one of the quietest corners of the ship late in the evening — several regulars go there precisely for that.

In the corridors, real notices comment on the art collection: not labels, texts. In the atrium, between decks 4 and 8, a living tree hangs in mid-air. And one detail worth its weight in the first days — deck signage always faces the way the ship actually points.

Out on deck

The pool deck is conventional and busy; the Solarium, glass-roofed and adults-only, is the refuge on windy days, and the sport court takes the restless. Forward on deck 12, though, there is a terrace most guests will never see: the Spa Veranda. You reach it by walking through the fitness centre, which is enough to keep it empty, and several regulars name it the best vantage point aboard at sailaway. Celebrity Edge takes the same logic much further and privatises her whole bow.

In the Solarium again, the Spa Café serves small healthy plates with almost never a line — provided you go before closing, which is sharp and comes without warning. A word on loungers, since the question always comes up: no pressure at all on transatlantics or in Alaska, but a genuine scramble in the Caribbean on sunny sea days.

What fills the days

The theatre stacks over three decks and turns out to be noticeably larger than the one aboard Celebrity Beyond, a far newer and far busier ship. You get in without a fight, and the bar stools at the back, on both levels, save the latecomers.

The programming is argued over: repetitive across seven nights according to one guest, never the same twice across twelve according to another. It depends on the length of the cruise and on where the cast sits in its contract. The recurring complaint is the same everywhere — the revues are musically dated.

Sea days have real structure: lectures, workshops, destination talks, and on nature itineraries a naturalist aboard. This is long-haul programming, built for people with time. The Wi-Fi splits opinion too: disappointing for some, perfectly fine for others.

The service

This is the one point on which the accounts never vary. Guests with nothing in common, opposite itineraries, fourteen years of reports — and the same observation every time: you get recognised. Your dinner waiter knows what you drink by the third night. Your stateroom attendant anticipates. This isn't surface politeness, it's consistency — and on a crossing that weighs more than a USB port.

"Choosing Eclipse means knowing in advance what you won't like about her, and sailing anyway."

Selvague

December 2025

On an eight-night cruise that left Port Everglades on December 20, 2025, 95 guests of 3,042 and 9 crew of 1,235 reported gastrointestinal symptoms. The mandatory reporting threshold, reached at 3.1%, triggered the standard procedure: isolating cases, stepping up cleaning, monitoring remotely with no inspection aboard. The causative agent was never identified — norovirus was not confirmed. The cruise ran in full, she sailed again on time, and it was Celebrity's first reported outbreak that year.

Our reading, and we give it for what it is, an opinion rather than an established fact: the great majority of gastrointestinal illness happens ashore, where nobody counts it. A ship counts everything and reports everything. That magnifying effect makes ships look more dangerous than they are, which does nothing to make the episode pleasanter for the people who lived it.