Celebrity Edge

Celebrity Edge was the first genuinely new Celebrity design in a decade when Saint-Nazaire handed her over in October 2018, and she is the ship that set the shape of everything the line has built since. Malala Yousafzai christened her at Fort Lauderdale that December. Five more Edge-class hulls have followed, the last two stretched by sixty-six feet, but the ideas are all hers, including the one that people still cannot agree about.

The Magic Carpet, plainly

It is a room on a rail. A cantilevered platform weighing about ninety tons and roughly the footprint of a tennis court is bolted to the starboard side of the hull on a track, and it moves under power between deck two and deck sixteen. It is orange, deliberately, so you can find the ship in a harbor.

What it does depends on where it is parked. At deck two it becomes the tender platform, which is the part that actually solves a problem, instead of queuing in a stuffy shell door you board a launch from a covered, seated space with a bar. At deck five it extends the Raw on 5 seafood restaurant out over the water. At deck fourteen it becomes an open-air bar level with the pool deck. At deck sixteen, the top, it hosts Dinner on the Edge, a ticketed four-course dinner for about ninety people served fifteen decks above the sea with nothing on the outboard side but a rail.

That is the honest description. It is one venue, not four, and on a full ship a seat on it is something you plan around rather than wander into. It is also genuinely unlike anything else afloat, and it works: the engineering has held up across eight years and six ships, and Celebrity has put one on every Edge-class hull since.

The Infinite Veranda, and why people argue

The other structural idea is the cabin. Instead of a balcony outside a sliding door, an Infinite Veranda pushes the exterior wall out to the edge of the hull and puts the whole space inside the room. A bi-fold door splits it into a sitting half and an outdoor half, and the top pane of the outboard window retracts into the wall so the outer half becomes open air.

The argument is real and you should know both halves of it. In its favor: the cabin is about a quarter larger in usable floor area than a conventional balcony stateroom, the whole room faces the sea rather than a slab of glass, and in cold or windy weather (Alaska, the Tasman) you get the view without the wind.

Against it: opening the window shuts off the cabin’s air conditioning, and the inner bi-fold doors are not airtight, so on a hot Caribbean afternoon the choice is a cool room or an open one. The window mechanism is slow and, on some cabins, loud. There is no separate outdoor space you can step out to while someone sleeps, and there is no rail to lean on. Anyone whose favorite part of a cruise is sitting outside with the door shut behind them will not like it. Celebrity has not backed away from the design, it is on all six Edge-class ships, but it is the single most common reason people book a different class.

Above the cabins, the Retreat carries suite guests through a private restaurant, lounge and sundeck; the Rooftop Garden and the Resort Deck do the outdoor space; and Eden, a multi-deck glass room across the stern, is the ship’s best-looking space and its least easily explained one. There are twenty-nine restaurants, bars and lounges aboard.

Where she actually sails

Edge is a long way from Fort Lauderdale these days. The bulk of her program runs from Sydney through the Australian summer (New Zealand, Tasmania and the South Pacific, with a few sailings turning at Auckland), and then she crosses the Pacific to Seattle for a full Alaska season, with a handful of Hawaii runs and transpacific repositionings joining the two together. Voyages run from four to nineteen nights, with nine about typical.

That deployment suits her. The Infinite Veranda is at its best in cool weather, and a glass-heavy ship in Alaska and the Tasman Sea is a better argument for itself than the same ship in August in the Caribbean.

Who she suits

Adults and couples who want a modern, design-led ship and long itineraries, and who are not booking for the balcony. She is very good at the things Celebrity has always been good at (food, service, a bar program that takes itself seriously), and the newer venues give her more range than the Solstice class.

She does not suit families looking for waterslides, ropes courses or go-karts; she has none. She does not suit anyone who wants a traditional wraparound promenade or a conventional balcony. And she is no longer new: two longer, larger sisters and a sixth hull have arrived since, and if being aboard the newest thing matters, Edge stopped being that in 2022.