Celebrity Summit

Celebrity Summit is a twenty-five-year-old ship that has been comprehensively rebuilt once and re-engined never, and both halves of that sentence matter. She came out of Chantiers de l’Atlantique in 2001 as plain Summit, third of the four Millennium-class hulls, and picked up the Celebrity prefix in 2008 when the line standardized its fleet names.

The turbines

Almost every cruise ship afloat is a diesel-electric. Summit is not. She has two General Electric LM2500+ gas turbines putting out about fifty thousand kilowatts between them, feeding two Rolls-Royce Mermaid azimuthing pods and three bow thrusters. Only a handful of passenger ships were ever built this way, and the Millennium class is most of them.

The upside is what you feel: turbines are smoother and quieter than reciprocating diesels, and the stern of this ship at twenty knots does not hum the way a comparable diesel ship’s does. The downside is fuel (turbines burn distillate, which costs more than the heavy oil a diesel ship can run on), and the pods, which were unreliable early in her career and needed upgrades and a decade of operating experience before they settled down. She was still pulled into an unscheduled drydock in March 2017 with a propulsion problem. It was an aviation answer to a marine question, and the industry did not repeat it.

She is quick, though. Her cruising speed is twenty-four knots, which is faster than the Edge-class ships manage, and it is part of why she can be given long, port-heavy itineraries.

The Revolution

In July 2018 Celebrity announced it would spend more than five hundred million dollars putting every Millennium- and Solstice-class ship through a program it called Celebrity Revolution, running from 2019 to 2023. Summit went in early. In March 2019 she spent about three weeks in drydock and further time in the yard, during which every existing cabin and suite aboard was gutted and refinished and thirty new cabins were added. An earlier sixteen-million-dollar refit in 2012 had already added cabins.

What that bought her is the modern Celebrity furniture on an old hull: The Retreat, a suite enclave with its own sundeck, lounge and restaurant in Luminae; Chef’s Table by Daniel Boulud; Tuscan Grille; Le Petit Chef; a rebuilt Oceanview Café; the Sunset Bar at the stern; and the Rendezvous Lounge. Starlink went in later and works.

What it did not buy her is a new ship. The public room layout is the one drawn in 1999, the ceilings are lower than anything built since, and the atrium is a 1990s-style stack rather than the piazza the Edge ships have. The Revolution was an interiors job, honestly and thoroughly done, on twenty-five-year-old steel.

Where she actually sails

She works harder and more widely than any other ship in this fleet. Summers she is at Vancouver running Alaska. Winters she splits between Tampa and Fort Lauderdale for the Caribbean and Bahamas and San Juan for the southern Caribbean, with a few Panama Canal transits threaded between seasons. Sailings run from four nights to eighteen.

Her size is why. At 965 feet and 105 feet in the beam she is a full third smaller than the Edge ships, fits the original Panama Canal locks with a foot to spare, and takes berths in Alaska and the eastern Caribbean that a 1,073-foot ship cannot. The small ship gets the interesting itineraries.

Who she suits

Anyone for whom the ports are the reason to go. The eighteen-night sailings and the Panama transits on her schedule are real voyages, not loops, and she is a comfortable, quiet, well-maintained ship to do them on. Suite guests get The Retreat, which on a ship of 2,218 people is a much larger share of the vessel than the same product represents on an Edge-class hull.

She does not suit anyone who wants new. There is no Magic Carpet, no Infinite Veranda, no two-story anything; her balconies are conventional balconies, which some people will read as the better deal. She does not suit families looking for onboard attractions; there are none. And a sea day on an eighteen-night sailing is a quieter proposition here than on a big ship, which is either the point or the problem.