Celebrity Eclipse

Celebrity Eclipse is the third of the five Solstice-class ships and the one with the best story attached to her. Meyer Werft delivered her on 15 April 2010. That same week the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud closed European airspace and left tens of thousands of British travelers stranded in Spain. Before she had carried a paying passenger, Celebrity canceled her shakedown plans and sent her to Bilbao to bring roughly two thousand of them home to Southampton for free. She was christened at Southampton on 24 April, days after she docked, and only then began the career she was actually built for.

What the 2025 drydock took and gave

She spent about three weeks at the Damen yard in Brest in the spring of 2025 and came out slightly larger in the only way that counts commercially. Ten inside staterooms were built across decks six, nine, twelve and fifteen, and they came out of rooms that no longer earned their space: the internet cafe and the tech shop, a leftover of the Apple partnership that dated her more than anything else aboard, plus the card room and the video arcade.

The rest of the money went into the Retreat. Suite guests got a dedicated Retreat Lounge on deck five and their own solarium on deck sixteen, on top of the restaurant and sundeck they already had. Carpets, upholstery and furniture were replaced across the public rooms.

It is worth being clear about what that is and is not. She never received the full Celebrity Revolution rebuild; her slot was booked for April 2020 and the pandemic killed it, and unlike Silhouette she never got a replacement date. The 2025 work was a good refresh laid over a 2010 interior, and it moved the ship’s center of gravity further toward suite guests: two of the four spaces that disappeared were free rooms open to everyone, and what replaced them is either a cabin or behind a keycard.

What she still has that Solstice does not

She kept the half acre of living grass on deck fifteen, irrigated, mown at sea, croquet on it. Her lead sister lost hers to artificial turf in the 2026 rebuild, and the rest of the class is scheduled for the same treatment; Eclipse is not expected in a yard for it before 2027. She also still has the glassblowing studio on the same deck, the working furnace at sea that Silhouette and Reflection were built without and that Solstice has now given up.

If either of those is why you want a Solstice-class ship, she is currently one of the last places to find them, and that will not stay true.

Where she actually sails

She has spent most of her career as a European ship and still is one. Summers run from Amsterdam (the British Isles, Norway, the Baltic and Iceland, on sailings that are typically eleven nights and go to fifteen) with shorter blocks turning at Piraeus and Barcelona in the Mediterranean shoulder season. Winters are Caribbean out of Fort Lauderdale, and two transatlantic crossings a year join the two halves.

Amsterdam is the detail to notice. Celebrity moved her northern European base there rather than to Southampton, which she used for years, and the itineraries that follow are longer and less port-dense than the Caribbean norm. The median sailing on her schedule is eleven nights. That is a different kind of vacation from a seven-night loop and it attracts a different, older crowd.

Who she suits

Adults and couples doing long northern European itineraries, and anyone who wants the Solstice class the way it was originally built. The glass-roofed adults-only solarium is the room that makes her work in the Baltic and in Iceland, where the open decks are unusable as often as not.

She does not suit families wanting hardware; there are no slides, no ropes course and no go-karts, and there never were. She does not suit anyone who expects a recently rebuilt ship; she is the Solstice sister who missed the Revolution program entirely, and the 2025 refresh did not change her bones. And anyone drawn to her by the Retreat should know they will be paying for a noticeably better version of the same ship than everyone else aboard.