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Airtours

MV Sunbird

Your Rating:
Reviewed by: Vickie Wright
# previous cruises: 2
Date of Trip: February 2, 2002
Itinerary: Caribbean - Southern

Generally, I thought the cruise was good value and the itinerary was excellent. The passengers were mainly British and Canadian, although I think the British prevailed. I personally am not the greatest sailor and I did hear some comments from other passengers that they didn't feel that the ship stabilizers were up to par. As I have only been on one other cruise, I can't really compare. I experienced some motion sickness on my previous cruise as well.

I found the public areas to be quite satisfactory. Everything was well maintained. The 2 pools were quite small (to be expected). They were really just for cooling off. I would have liked to participate in aqua fit classes in the pool on a daily basis, but due to the small size of the pools it was rather difficult. The aqua fit classes were only offered sporadically. I must confess that I didn't make use of the gym or other forms of exercise available (e.g. table tennis).

My husband and I generally ate all our meals in the main dining room as we really enjoyed the table service and the selection of meals. You could order practically anything you wanted for breakfast including smoked salmon from the menu or help yourself from the breakfast buffet. The table service at breakfast was not as adequate as it was at lunch or dinner. There was no assigned seating for breakfast or lunch in the dining room. There were usually 4 or 5 entrees on the dinner menu. We found dinner portions to be quite small, but tasty (leaving room for dessert). Believe it or not we didn't even see the midnight buffet, as we were early to be most evenings (after the shows). The cabin steward did a wonderful job of keeping our cabin clean and tidy. As our booking was to be all inclusive (including gratuities) we found it rather discerning to learn that an additional gratuity was also expected. It left us not really knowing if the staff were given the appropriate gratuity. We felt that the all-inclusive drink plan was far too expensive after converting the price into Canadian funds.

The Lido Cafe catered to the British with "elevenses" and "afternoon tea", but we thought it was a very nice touch and quite enjoyed it.

We were at odds when we arrived on the ship as we were between meals and starving. We did manage to find some baguette sandwiches, but it would have been nice to have a little choice of snacks as we had been without lunch that day due to our flight arrival time.

Our cabin was located on the outside on the 2nd floor near mid ship. We found it to be very compact but satisfactory. The shower was a very tight fit, but we had great water pressure. We had requested beds that could be pushed together to form one bed at the time of booking, but discovered that we had separate beds (not a pleasant surprise for us). We were never bothered by noise.

We attended most of the shows (early sitting). Unfortunately we missed the big show on the Saturday evening we arrived as we had been up for 36 hours at that point with no sleep. Some of the shows were better than others, and the some of the singers hired to perform were quite good. The regular ship entertainers were entertaining as well.

Ports of call were Aruba, Barbados, St. Lucia, Grenada, Curacao and Margarita Island. Enjoyed all the stops, but we didn't tour around on Margarita Island. We had heard about lack of safety, so we didn't want to chance it. We didn't book any of the ship excursions, preferring to make our own arrangements on arrival.

We met a wonderful British couple (Angela and Allan) and we plan to keep in touch and hopefully visit one another in the future.