Celebrity Apex

Celebrity Apex is the second of the Edge class, and she has the strangest start of any ship in this fleet. Chantiers de l’Atlantique finished her in early March 2020. Celebrity took delivery on 27 March by video link, because by then no one from the company could get to Saint-Nazaire. Seven crew at the yard tested positive for COVID-19 shortly before the handover and the count eventually reached 224 among those tested. Her maiden voyage from Southampton was canceled. She did not carry a paying passenger until 19 June 2021, sailing the Greek islands out of Athens; fifteen months after she was legally Celebrity’s ship.

What an Edge-class ship actually is

Two things define the class, and both are worth understanding before you book one, because both are arguments.

The Magic Carpet. An orange, glass-sheltered platform the size of a decent restaurant, cantilevered off the starboard side of the hull and running on a vertical track. At the embarkation deck it is a tender platform, which is its practical job: it puts the tender boarding point at the height of the tender instead of forcing a scramble through a shell door, and it keeps the boats off the paint. Raised, it is a bar and a dining room hanging over open water with nothing under it. It is the only structure of its kind on any cruise ship and it does genuinely change what the outside of a ship can be.

The Infinite Veranda. This is the divisive one. On most of her staterooms there is no balcony in the traditional sense. Celebrity moved the ship’s steel outboard so that what would have been the balcony slab is inside the room. The outer wall is glass; at the touch of a button the upper section folds back and the lower window drops, and the forward third of the cabin, about forty-two square feet of a 243-square-foot room, becomes open to the air behind a railing.

Celebrity’s case for it is floor area, and the case is real: the room is about a quarter larger than a veranda stateroom on the older Solstice ships, and on a sea day in bad weather you have that space indoors rather than staring at it through a door.

The objection follows from the same geometry. It is one room, not two. There is no door between the bed and the open air, so one person cannot sit outside at seven in the morning while the other sleeps. Weather, wind, spray and the noise of the ship come into the cabin rather than onto a separate slab. And there is nowhere to put two proper loungers, because the “veranda” is a strip of your bedroom floor. People who mainly wanted a bigger room with a very large window are delighted. People whose definition of a balcony is a private outdoor room with a door that shuts are not, and they are not being unreasonable.

Apex also has Eden, a three-deck lounge at the stern wrapped in 270 degrees of glass, with a ramp running between decks five and six, a bar, a café and a restaurant. It is the best room in the class and, as it happens, the one Celebrity deleted on the newest ship in the series.

Where she actually sails

Two seasons, an ocean apart. Winters she runs the Caribbean from Port Canaveral (four to eight nights, the bulk of her calendar), and summers she is at Southampton, which is the deployment she was originally built to open in 2020 and never got to. Two transatlantic crossings a year move her between them, and those are the long sailings on her schedule at up to fourteen nights.

The Southampton season is the useful thing here. It is a no-fly departure for British guests on a ship that is otherwise a Florida boat, and it is the only place in her year where the itineraries are properly long.

Who she suits

Adults and couples. The Edge class has no waterslide, no go-karts and no climbing wall; the entertainment is a theater with a moving stage, a piazza-style atrium and about twenty-nine places to eat and drink. It is a ship for people who consider dinner the main event.

She does not suit anyone who needs a conventional balcony; check the cabin category twice, because the Infinite Veranda is what most of this ship is. She does not suit families with children who want something to do at two in the afternoon. And at 130,818 tons she is the smaller, older Edge hull: if you want the stretched version with the extra deck, that is Beyond, not Apex.