How Regent's Seven Seas Grandeur stacks up

Travel Weekly

16 hours ago

Richard Turen
I've recently returned from a 12-day British Isles cruise out of Southampton on the Seven Seas Grandeur, the newest Explorer-class ship in the Regent Seven Seas Cruises fleet.
I looked for the Picasso print in a public restroom, and I stood transfixed by the most stylish main dining room on any ship I have ever sailed, a space that features lovely contoured arches and degrees of dining separation that should earn at least one of the architectural firms that worked on this project some sort of industry award. The design features carried over into public spaces and the specialty restaurants to a degree that it might be a good idea for other ship designers to sail the Grandeur before taking pen to paper or fingers to AI design kits.
Related story: The little things add up on Regent's Seven Seas Grandeur
But this is reading like a PR piece, and that is not what I do.
This was our family's second Signature vacation of the year, and we were accompanied by 28 extremely well-traveled clients, many of whom have achieved our Cruise Ship Inspector status. That means they have been trained and are qualified to review all aspects of a ship's operations. They complete the same forms that Angela and I use to take notes so that no aspect of a ship's services is overlooked. I had some excellent research from this group, which, in general, matched my opinions of what we had experienced.
Let me summarize just a few of my opinions about our experience aboard Regent's newest ship:
• Regent remains among the top five or six cruise lines in the world. Its uniqueness is centered on numerous inclusions like shore excursions and an absence of specialty dining surcharges.
• Many of your clients will prefer Regent to the competition simply because their dress rules cater to an American audience. There are no formal nights on any cruise of less than 16 nights. Often, the sale is completed when this fact is mentioned.
I laugh when I think about formal nights on Alaska cruises. How many of the wilderness houses one sees along the Inside Passage are owned by people who have a suit hanging in the closet?
In a way, Regent just "gets it" in ways many of their competitors do not. They score No. 1 in the They Get It category.
• I have mentioned to a number of cruise executives that any rankings I am associated with will never grant five-star status to any line that does not address onboard guests by name. That is a great point of differentiation and one of the reasons I have not previously felt that Regent was a five-star product. That has now changed. Staff is using iPads to write down guest requests, and they are being recorded for future use.
• There were many pluses and minuses in the cuisine category. Pacific Rim may be the finest Asian restaurant at sea. Don't leave this surprise hit without sampling the duck rolls and the lobster tempura. But the contemporary French eatery Chartreuse was an ongoing disappointment. I don't quite understand why escargot is served as a kind of colorful fried meatball. My haddock was a hamburger-shaped piece of fried fish atop a small plateau of olives, looking to escape.
• Services on the open decks and in several lounges were largely impersonal, with staff often unable to engage in conversation. This was not the case in the restaurants.
All in all, the Regent experience was a major plus for our guests. When you are seeking to be the casual, high-end contemporary option competing with more formalized stalwarts, you play the game with some distinct consumer advantages.
Next column, some port talk.