Celebrity Cruises Makes Dining Changes After Guest Feedback

Celebrity Cruises is making more tweaks to its onboard menus and bringing back fan favorites to the main dining rooms, including nightly chocolate dessert options.

These changes are in response to Captain’s Club guest feedback as well as intense research that shows a desire for more diversity in the menus.

Celebrity Cruises Dining Changes

In response to guest feedback from recent dining room menu changes, Celebrity Cruises President, Laura Hodges Bethge and 19 members of the cruise line’s leadership team spent time onboard Celebrity Equinox to truly experience the dining menus for themselves.

What they discovered was that those menus, while high quality and offering great dishes, needed some added diversity.

“We spent a lot of time in the main dining room especially at dinner time because we really wanted to understand and experience what our guests were experiencing,” Bethge explained.

Because many loyal Celebrity Cruises guests enjoy back-to-back sailings, or even three or four cruises one after the other, a less diverse menu can really stand out.

“One of the biggest comments that has come out from our changes that we made was variety,” Bethge commented. “You all thought we were lacking variety, and I have to say I agree with you. Our cruise was six nights and by day three or four I was looking for different types of things.”

The first step to adding more diversity to the main dining room menus will be to bring back the “classics” section, which typically includes such appetizers as a Caesar salad, chilled shrimp cocktail, and baked French onion soup, as well as entrees like grilled New York sirloin steak, broiled salmon, and grilled chicken breast.

The exact classic or “timeless” selections that will be added back into the menu have not yet been confirmed, and may be tweaked slightly for even more flavor and distinction with their reintroduction.

Decadent Desserts

Another change coming soon to the Celebrity Cruises’ menus is the addition of a chocolate dessert option every single night. While not all guests enjoy a chocolate dessert, the flavor is so popular that it is definitely missed when absent.

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What chocolate treats will be available is not yet announced, but could include any variety of cakes, pies, truffles, ice cream, gelato, mousse, cookies, or other decadent desserts in white, dark, or milk chocolate.

Celebrity Changes Coming Soon

When cruise lines change menus, it isn’t unusual for such changes to be tested on a limited number of ships first. Such tests may take weeks or months of tasting, feedback, data collection, and refinement before any changes are rolled out fleet-wide.

Celebrity Cruises is not taking that time, however, and Bethge asserts that the return of the classic options will be in place by the end of November, hopefully by Thanksgiving. This brings back favorite dishes just in time for the ever-popular holiday sailings.

This is also a popular time of year for back-to-back sailings, making the return of favorite dishes especially important for guests to enjoy if they will be on board for a longer than typical cruise vacation.

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Fortunately, since the classic dishes have been long-time staples for the cruise line, it will be a relatively easy matter to reintroduce them in short order. The recipes will not need to be significantly tweaked or developed, a culinary creative process that can take time.

What will take time, of course, is ensuring that ships are adequately supplied for the new dishes and having new menus printed to reflect the changes. But what a holiday present for all Celebrity Cruises guests to enjoy in the weeks to come!