We got done last month with a three-week cruise on Silversea from San Francisco to New York via the Panama Canal. It was definitely not trashy. And we got to see @Pescado_Rojo in Cabo, so that was fun.
We were traveling with the kids, and we had two suites (all of the rooms on Silversea are suites), but they weren't connecting and were a bit down the hall from one another. So about two weeks before the cruise, the agent calls me up and says, "Hey, Mr. GOLL, good news--there's an upgrade available to the two-bedroom Owners' suite for a price of just eleventy trillion dollars." And, I mean--why not?
So at this point in the review, may I suggest you cue up the Vivaldi to play in the background as you read further:
So here's the deal with Silversea: everything is included. Ok--pretty much everything. The drinks are included, the gratuities are included, one shore excursion at each stop is included. There are certain premium drinks that cost extra. If you want a cigar in the cigar bar, those are extra. There is one restaurant that has a $60 pp cover charge. But yeah--pretty much once you step on that boat, you can throw your wallet in the safe and never touch it again.
Another thing with Silversea is the service. On our ship, the Silver Shadow, there are about 350 passengers and 300 crew members, so you have close to a 1-1 passenger-to-crew ratio. Each suite has its own butler, of whom you can ask the most absurd requests. I asked for caviar service and a fresh bottle of champagne in the room every evening at 6:00--I mean, it's included, after all--and it was done. And with so few passengers, the crew pretty quickly figures out your name and what your preferences are. It took them about two days to figure out that I was going to want a dirty Grey Goose martini with three blue cheese olives at the beginning of every dinner. By the end of the first week, they just stopped asking--it just appeared a few minutes after I sat down.
As you can imagine, all this comes at a price. So yeah--that's another deal with Silversea: it's fantastically expensive.
A by-product of that is that it attracts an older crowd. My kids were the only kids on the ship. And they were kind of a novelty--that ship obviously doesn't see a lot of kids. The passengers ranged from about 45 to 75, with most being between probably 55 and 70. It was about a third Americans/Canadians, a third British, and a third various other countries (a fair number of Germans and Swiss, a handful of Australians, probably six French, and a couple of Finns--the Finns were a fucking blast).
With that kind of crowd--i.e., an international crowd that can afford that type of cruise--it's kind of the opposite of other cruises I've been on, where you kind of put your head down and try to avoid interacting with any of these people. On this cruise, the other passengers were fascinating. I mean, some of them were fucking wild. Olga the rich tech widow from Monterey was one of the more interesting people I've ever met.
So yeah--all y'all fancy Surly-ites who don't want to deal with trashy cruise lines, . . . maybe check that out.