An invitation to a shakedown, offering two nights on a yacht en route from Venice to Croatia. Even without fully comprehending the offer, it sounded irresistible.
A shakedown is “a trial run, operation, etc to familiarise personnel with procedures and machinery (chiefly US)”. Hotels may prepare themselves for paying guests with “soft openings”, a period when rates are reduced on the understanding that service may not be up to scratch, and not everything will be ready. Cruise lines don’t have that option; everything needs to be shipshape on a maiden voyage. All credit, then, to the upmarket US brand Yachts of Seabourn, part of the cruise giant Carnival, that rather than try out the latest addition to their fleet, M/V Seabourn Odyssey, on eager-to-please friends, family and staff from head office, they decided to test it on an international party of people conditioned to find fault. Though it would be naive not to see it as a PR exercise (no one was paying and they treated us royally), the point of the trip was to elicit criticism of the sternest sort. Certainly, Pamela Conover, Seabourn’s president and chief executive, looked careworn as we disembarked.
For all that, my first impressions were promising. Odyssey is a handsome piece of nautical architecture, though I’d challenge Seabourn’s insistence that it is a yacht as, at 200m, it is 30m longer even than the estimated length of Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse , currently the largest superyacht at sea.
With 225 suites (no mere cabins), six bars, four restaurants, two small swimming pools, shops, a casino, putting green and spa, it feels like a big boat, however dwarfed it looked next to the Costa Fortuna, the 272m, 1,358-cabin behemoth that occupied a neighbouring berth in Venice’s Stazione Marittima. This sense of spaciousness extends even to the standard suites. Mine had a granite-lined bathroom large enough to accommodate a bath (admittedly a small one), a separate shower cubicle and two basins; a capacious walk-in wardrobe (an interpret-it-as-you-wish “black tie-optional” dress code prevails some evenings); a kingsize bed and beyond it a seating area with a sofa, table and chairs. There was a flatscreen television loaded with perhaps 200 films and a copy of Richard Ford’s Granta anthology of American short stories.
Not everything worked, but then that was what I was there to establish. But a complaint about the colour of the water in the lavatory prompted a wholesale replacement of bowl and cistern. Too bad I never persuaded them to fix the lack of hot water in the shower, but I fear that was down to the Anglophone stewardess’s conviction that the problem lay with me. “The water heat can be adjusted by turning the lower knozzel [sic],” read one (I sensed exasperated) note she wrote. But whichever way I turned either lever, it only ran cold.
Inevitably, there were glitches in other areas too: room service in particular, I felt, was going to benefit from guinea pigs to practise on. By contrast, both food and service in the restaurants were outstanding. The menus have been devised by the US chef Charlie Palmer, most celebrated for his restaurant Aureole in New York, who obviously doesn’t actually cook on-board very often, but was shaking down with the rest of us and much in evidence, whether it was checking the ice cream they serve in the library lounge (the pistachio is the best I’ve ever tasted) to overseeing the plating of dishes in the fine-dining restaurant, where the menu is almost obscenely extravagant in its use of caviar, lobster and foie gras. (Not that there aren’t simpler options elsewhere on board.) That cooking of this calibre is offered as part of an all-inclusive deal that also runs to drinks seemed to me admirable. And I was glad to note, too, that tipping is “neither required nor expected”.
Our views were canvassed relentlessly, never formally, but in 48 hours I must have been asked about everything from what I thought of the bed linen to the after-dinner entertainment.
As to the cruise itself, this was the only disappointment. Even before we’d boarded, a new, nearer destination had been announced, but as embarkation times came and went, it began to dawn on us that we were going nowhere. A day, a night, another morning passed before we got under way, and even then we cruised only as far as the Arsenale, a distance of perhaps 3km. Let’s hope that when it comes to adhering to itineraries, calling the ship Odyssey isn’t asking for trouble.
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Details
Yachts of Seabourn, www.seabourn.com. Seven-day cruises start at €5,340pp based on two sharing, though discounts may be available. Odyssey’s maiden Caribbean voyage embarks on November 14
