Kevin’s MBA program has introduced us to one of our new favorite rituals: adult Spring Break. I (Lucy) work a normal 9-to-5 job while Kevin is a full-time student, so it’s really nice to take a week off of work during one of the most brutal Chicago winter months. For Spring Break this year, we met up with our two other couple friends, and each person “pitched” a destination to the group — with a matching adult beverage, of course! In our pitch, we each shared a mock itinerary and initial budget outline for our destination choices. One person pitched a couple destinations in Europe, and a couple people pitched resorts in Mexico. At the end of the night of pitches, we voted on where we’d go for spring break!

My pitch won (unanamously!), so we took a 7-night Eastern Caribbean cruise on the Celebrity Edge. The cruise left out of Port Everglades in Ft. Lauderdale, so Kevin and I flew into Miami a few days early to spend the weekend there before boarding the ship with our friends on Sunday. Read all about our cruise experience below!

Choosing & Booking a Room

There are quite a few options to choose from when booking a room for the Celebrity Edge. Also, there are quite a few ways to go about booking a cruise! We booked through a travel agent (and Instagram friend!) Meghan Hayes with Traveling with Meghan. Learn more about her here!

Room Options

As I mentioned, there are quite a few options for rooms. Here’s an overview of options, which doesn’t include the any of the premium level options like Concierge Class, Edge Class, or Aqua Class.

• Infinite Veranda – This room features an open-air veranda that opens and closes with the touch of a button! Enjoy your coffee on the balcony with amazing sea views.
• Ocean View – Enjoy a gorgeous view of the water with an ocean view room. For anyone that may be a little clostrophobic, we recommend this at a minimum!
• Inside & Deluxe Inside – These are the most affordable options and they do not feautre a window or let in outside light. We had the deluxe inside stateroom and were pleased with our choice! We felt like there was ample room to unpack and store our clothes, and we found the lack of daylight nice for sleeping in! We didn’t spend too much time on our rooms, so this option was perfect for us.

We recommend checking out the Edge info on Celebrity’s website here if you want to see photos and videos of each of the room types. Also, we heard this tip from another cruise goer, but we recommend checking in with guest services upon boarding and asking if there are any rooms available to upgrade. Sometimes, cruise lines will offer upgrades at a small fee or free on the day of embarkment! We didn’t try this but wish we had, especially with our crusie being at less than 50% capacity.

Booking Process

If you don’t book through a travel agent, it’s pretty simple to book through Celebrity’s website. They make it pretty easy to explore and book trips. You can browse by port location, timing of the trip, length of the trip, ports of call, and more! You can also book flights through Celebrity or a travel agent, but we chose to book those ourselves. Overall, the booking process was smooth and we loved the online cruise manager feature for booking dinner reservations and excursions.

Also, Celebrity has a pretty extensive mobile app which we also found useful. It’s possible to book dinner reservations and excursious through the app, and the app allows you to see your daily calendar which is helpful throughout the trip. Plus, the app also shows the daily calendar of all the onboard activities, so it’s nice to plan out your days. Lastly, the app can be used as your room key as well! It is exteremly functional and a neat touch that we hadn’t experienced from other cruise lines.

Food & Drinks

For alcohol, we booked the Elevate Package, which was an added cost of $30 per person per day and included more premium beverages and we were thrilled with our choice. While the Always Included Package that everyone receives upon booking covers up to $9 beverages, we found that the majority of drinks that we wanted fell closer to $15, which was covered in the Elevate Package. The Elevate Package campe in handy with specialty coffee beverages and smoothies, as well. It also got us more onboard credit, which we used for excurisons and the casino. You can use any onboard credit for the restaurants and bars, so we tried out a fancier bar, Eden, and used onboard credit to pay the difference in our package inclusion of $15/drink to the full-drink price, so it ended up only being $12 for our two drinks from Eden.

There were many bar options on board! We tried them all and loved them all! I’d say our favorite was Martini Bar! The menu was expansive and every drink I had was delicious. It was housed in the middle of the ship with other floors overlooking it, making it the perfect gathering spot before and after dinner. Here’s a brief overview of each of the bars:

• Sunset Bar – On deck 15 aft, this bar was the perfect spot to watch the sunset. The views were great and the staff was friendly.
• Magic Carpet Bar – Located on level 14 with the pool, Sunset Bar was the perfect place to grab a drink overlooking the ocean below. The Magic Carpet can move floors and serves multiple purposes, but on our cruise it was always on floor 14.
• Prism Pool Bar – This was our go-to for sea days! The servers would take orders from your chair or the pool even. You could also always walk up and order directly at the bar!
• Martini Bar – The go-to spot on the ship! Full of entertainment and life, it was the perfect spot for a delicious drink.
• Eden Bar – Eden felt like a garden dream! With fun experiential cocktails, it was a fun spot to try on the cruise. Most drinks were outside of even the Elevate package, so just keep that in mind. You could always pay for each drink or the difference in the package coverage to the drink price.
• Casino Bar – Located within the casino, this was a good spot to grab a drink before hitting the tables.
• Club Bar – We spent a lot of time at the gameshows, entertainment shows, and dancing the night away at the Club. The bar there was fun and never judged us for ordering dozens of Malibu shots a night 🙂
• Cafe al Bacio – This spot offered specialty coffees and teas, along with alcoholic coffee beverages. We started everyday with iced Americanos and they were perfect!

For food, we only tried the complimentary dining options on the cruise, but they all were outstanding! At each restaurant, there were the Celebrity Classics that didn’t change at all the entire cruise. Think appetizers like Caesar salad, shrimp cocktail and meals like salmon and chicken. These were Celebrity’s tried and true foods that anyone would love. Then, there was the Celebrity Signatures. These meals changed each day but were served at every complimentary restaurant. Lastly, there were exclusive meals for each restaurant that stayed the same the entire trip. All of that to say, you really can’t go wrong with choosing any of the complimentary options! The options were endless and delicious.

Before boarding, we read reviews of the specialty dining restaurants and many had raving reviews. We could have used our onboard credit for meals there ($45/person for lunch and $55/person for dinner), but we chose to stick to the complimentary options after experiencing how great they were!

Here’s an overview of the five complimentary restaurants:

• Cosmopolitan – Featuring classic American food, Cosmopolitan was a fun spot with great food options.
• Tuscan – With an Italian flair, Tuscan became one of our favorite restaurants too!
• Cypress – Cypress featured Medeterrian (Greek/Turkish) fares with delicious appetizer options and fresh fish. We went back here multiple times!
• Normandie – Another favorite was French restaurant Normandie. We loved the food here and also revisited a couple times.

Onboard Activities

Onboard the Celebrity Edge there are so many different activities to try out! From Zumba in the mornings, to shows in the evenings, to live gameshows, comedians, and silent discos, there’s truly someone for everyone. We felt like there was always something going on to choose from, and we enjoyed interacting with other cruise guests during the activities.

Kevin and our other friends participated in quite a few of the game night activities like Family Fueud, along with a couple daytime pool activities as well. It was so fun to get involved in and watch!

We loved there was always amazing live music in different parts of the ship. From poolside DJ sessions (shout out to DJ Gilla!), to multiple different band performances, to 80s night with the talented performing crew, we were always entertained and impressed with the talent.

In addition to organized activities, there were also so many options to go at your own pace. From the walking track that overlooked the pool, to the outdoor pool and the indoor solarium, there were so many options! It’s safe to say we were never bored and spent very little time in our rooms.

Excursions

We participated in one excursion through Celebrity. It was a sailboat tour on the Golden Eagle in St. Maarten. We disembarked around 8:00 am and were escorted to the near by sail boat port to board the Golden Eagle. We were surprised by how many people were also on the boat (around 50), but once we were onboard we were able to spread out and it didn’t feel too crowded. We enjoyed the snorkeling, swimming, and beach time on the excursion. We returned to the Edge around noon and were able to enjoy lunch and the afternoon on the boat.

In Tortola, we disembarked the boat and went to the taxi area to head to a local beach. We met a nice taxi driver who helped us decide on the beach. I had been to Smuggler’s Cove a few years ago, but it was quite desolate. We set out with a plan to go to Cane Garden Bay because we heard it was the most popular, but Neil the taxi driver convinced us to go to Long Bay Beach instead. Long Bay was beautiful and it wasn’t overrun by tourists! There were two families that operated beach services at Long Bay. We chose one and purchased 2 chairs, an umbrella, and 2 rum punches with wifi access for just $20 for the entire afternoon. We induldged ourselves with several beer buckets and spent almost all of our time in the beautiful water! Overall, we were so satisfied with Long Bay Beach and I’d go there again without hesitation!

Our stop in Puerto Rico was just from 4:00 pm to 10:00 pm, so we left the ship and hit the ground running. Not quite literally running, but we did explore San Juan by foot. We loved getting to see the colorful streets and local shops and restaurants. We visited a few different bars but really loved our stop at La Factoria! It’s a must if you’re in Puerto Rico!

Service

The service levels on the Celebrity Edge were unparalleled! The all around best service experience we’ve encountered was at Excellence Playa Mujeres, but honestly, Celebrity comes decently close! Having sailed a couple different cruise lines before, I can confidently say Celebrity was far beyond the service levels of any other line! It helps that we are coming off the tail end of the pandemic, so there were only 1,400 passengers (less than 50% capacity) and 900 staff members. With ratios like that, it checks out that the service was so impeccable. All of the servers and staff were kind, curtious, and helfpul. We visited guest services right after boarding because our drink package wasn’t denoted properly on our Sea Passes. The guest services agent was exteremely attentive and kind and resolved the issue in a matter of minutes. For food and drink service, that was also wonderful! Ordering drinks from the pool was a breeze, and we never waited more than a few minutes at the most popular bars. Our favorite server was Christopher from the Phillapines who worked at the Cosmopolitan restaurant. Our room attendant, Garfield, went above and beyond to make our room every morning and turn down the room before bedtime.

One of the best parts of Celebrity is that their “always included” fares, which everyone pays, includes gratuity. It also includes wifi, whcih was really nice ot have. We didn’t have to carry cash or worry about tipping the proper ammounts after meals, ordering drinks, etc. We did bring some cash for exceptional service and for our room attendant, which we’d recommend!

Overall Experience

Overall, we absolutely loved our stay on the Celebrity Edge! We’d definitely love to travel on the Edge again! We’re also interested in trying out Celebrity’s other new ship, the Apex, as well. We think this crusie would be perfect for families with grown children, couples’ trips, or even a romantic getaway. Let us know if you’ve ever sailed with Celebrity or on the Edge, and be sure to let us know if you’re planning to after reading our post. Enjoy!