Celebrity Millennium

Celebrity Millennium was handed over by Chantiers de l’Atlantique in June 2000 and gave her name to the four ships that followed her, Infinity, Summit and Constellation. She is twenty-six years old, and that is the honest place to start. What makes her worth a page of her own is that she was the ship Celebrity chose to rebuild first when it decided the class was worth keeping, and that underneath the new carpet she is still one of the very few cruise ships in the world driven by jet engines.

The gas turbines and the pods

Most cruise ships burn heavy fuel in medium-speed diesels turning a pair of shafts. Millennium does not. She has two General Electric gas turbines and a steam turbine recovering their exhaust heat, together making about 50,000 kW, and the electricity goes to two 19 MW Rolls-Royce/Alstom Mermaid azimuth pods hung under the stern. The pods swivel, so she needs no rudders and very little tug help.

It was a clean, quiet, elegant idea and it went badly wrong. The Mermaid pods on all four sisters chewed through bearings. Millennium was in emergency dry dock inside six months of entering service. In July 2007 she took propeller damage on a submerged rock. In August 2013 the pod motors failed electrically in Alaska, killing the rest of her season at a reported cost of around thirty-one million dollars. Royal Caribbean sued the pod makers over the class and settled in 2010.

The propulsion has been sorted out for years now, and the turbines make her noticeably smoother and quieter aft than a diesel ship of the same age. But it is the reason her early career reads like a repair log, and it is why she burns more fuel than a modern hull of her size.

What the 2019 refit did

She went into Sembcorp Marine’s Sembawang yard in Singapore in January 2019 for thirty-five days and came out as the first ship finished under Celebrity Revolution, the fleet-wide, five-hundred-million-dollar modernization that ran from 2019 to 2023 across all four Millennium-class and all five Solstice-class ships.

The work was real. Thirty new cabins were cut in, every existing stateroom was stripped back to new bedding, bathrooms and finishes, the spa was rebuilt, and the suite areas were consolidated into The Retreat: a private sundeck, a lounge, and Luminae as a suites-only restaurant. Tuscan Grille, the Oceanview Café, Café al Bacio and the Chef’s Table came out of it renewed rather than replaced. Starlink went in later.

What the refit did not do is change the ship. The public rooms sit where the naval architects put them in 1999, the atrium is a nineties atrium, there is no promenade neighborhood and no waterslide, and the cabins outside the suites are small by current standards. She is a well-kept ship of her generation, not a ship that has been made new.

Where she actually sails

Asia, and at present nothing else. She works long loops of nine to fifteen nights, most often twelve, turning at Tokyo and Singapore with additional departures from Benoa in Bali and Incheon for Seoul, and the program runs out past the middle of 2028. That is a genuine change of career: she spent most of the last decade on Alaska in the summer, and in July 2021 she was the second ship in the world to restart Alaska sailings after the shutdown, having reopened Celebrity’s Caribbean operation out of St. Maarten a few weeks earlier.

The Asia deployment suits her. At 965 feet and ninety-one thousand tons she is small enough for ports that turn away the big new hulls, and the itineraries are long enough that the ship is a base rather than the attraction.

Who she suits

People who are buying the itinerary. On a twelve-night run through Japan or the Malacca Strait you are ashore most days, and what you want at the end of one is a quiet ship with a good dining room and a spa, which is exactly what she is. Adults and couples do best aboard.

She does not suit anyone who wants a new ship, or a big one. There is no go-kart track, no ropes course and no serious kids’ program; the standard balcony cabin is tight; and a hull from 2000 shows its age in the corridors and the elevator lobbies no matter how recently the carpet was changed. If the photographs of Celebrity’s Edge-class ships are what sold you on the line, this is not that ship and the price should reflect it.