Honest Celebrity Retreat Review: Is the Suite Life Worthwhile?
A private lounge, separate pools and sundeck, upscale dining, early embarkation, and included premium drink and wifi packages. These are some of the benefits of booking a suite in the Celebrity Retreat and what we enjoyed during our summer 2026 Mediterranean cruise from Barcelona to Athens. This is our Celebrity Retreat review, where we’ll contrast our experience in the Retreat on the Xcel and Apex. Meanwhile, if you haven’t already done so, check out our Acropolis / Disembarkation Day post to see how we fit the Acropolis in between disembarkation and flying home.
What is Celebrity Retreat?
The Retreat is Celebrity’s premium experience offered only to suite guests. Not quite a ship-within-a-ship experience, it offers a series of personalized concierge services and venues that require Retreat keycard access, while retaining access to the ship’s main amenities. The venues tend to be clustered together. The staterooms are spread across the ship.
The Retreat differs from MSC’s Yacht Club and Norwegian’s The Haven where guests are essentially in an enclosed enclave — physically separate from everyone else. The suites, lounges, restaurants and pools are bundled together in one area of the ship and those guests never have to see “Gen Pop” if they choose not to.
Technically speaking, when you book any suite, you have booked the Retreat. On the Edge class ships, such as the two on which we’ve sailed – Apex & Xcel – eight distinct suite categories exist. The standard / “least expensive” category includes the Sunset and Sky Suites, the latter being what we enjoyed during this sailing as well as on the Apex last year. The mid-tier / “pretty expensive” category includes the Aqua Sky Suite, Celebrity Suite, and Royal Suite, while the ultra-luxury / “really expensive” category includes the Edge Villa, Penthouse Suite, and Iconic Suite.
For more details on the characteristics of the Sky Suite and a comparison with an Infinite Veranda on the Xcel, check out our Xcel Sky Suite review. To learn about all the suites, or any stateroom on the Xcel for that matter, head on over to Celebrity.
The Perks, One by One
You can’t do a Celebrity Retreat review without talking about the perks. Beyond the awesome sauce that is your suite, let’s talk about a bunch of the amenities included. Many perks are included for all Retreat guests, but some are only available at higher level suite categories. Let’s start with the ones that make it hard to not be in the Retreat, and work our way toward the ones we didn’t use or for which we didn’t qualify.
Our Favorites / Highest Value
Luminae is the suites-only restaurant, and definitely raises the bar for the food and service as compared with the main dining rooms. Having the same servers for each meal made a difference for us. We will have a dining recap in a future post, so feel free to subscribe if you want to be notified automatically when it’s published.
We don’t drink much at home, but we definitely do have a few drinks on vacation, and perhaps quite a few more on a cruise. We wind up buying the premium drink package so that we don’t have to think about whether that specialty cocktail we want is going to cost extra. But in the Retreat, the premium drink package is included.
The both of us can often be found on our phones or iPads, surfing the internet, doomscrolling social media, or playing games. Basic Wi-Fi is enough for checking email or messaging, but we are who we are and so the included premium Wi-Fi is a bonus.
Maybe this is unnecessary, but we love priority embarkation and disembarkation. Who wouldn’t want to get on the ship first thing and get their vacation started? The Retreat waiting area in the cruise terminal is also a nice way to ease onto the ship if you’re early. The disembarkation bit just gives you a more relaxing place to wait before you get off the ship. We didn’t take advantage of it this sailing, but did on the Apex.
We used a lot, but could manage without
We saw all but one of the shows in the Celebrity Theater, and sat in the reserved theater seating each time. Celebrity advertises this as only available on evening chic nights, but that block of seats on deck 5 was available every night up until 15 minutes before showtime, when the seating opened for everyone. As nice as it was to return to the same seating area every night, the theater never seemed so packed that we wouldn’t have been able to find seats even 10 minutes before showtime.
Because this was a port-intensive sailing and we had some early mornings, we did order breakfast room service a couple of times and selected some hot items that ordinarily cost extra. With the Retreat’s full in-suite breakfast, lunch, dinner service, and daily delights perk, everything was included. We never did order lunch or dinner, but had some afternoon snacks / daily delights. This was good for us, but not essential.
We dug into the Butler service in our Embarkation Day trip report. Vengai was awesome. He arranged some dining for us, delivered room service, escorted us out onto the pier in Kusadasi, and was so helpful and friendly. He gave us his WhatsApp to contact him – this was what Butler Chat was on this sailing. All that said, we’re pretty good at managing our own reservations, so this was an extravagance we could have survived without.
Lastly, there’s the premium bath and body products, the cashmere mattress with exclusive Retreat bedding, and premium bath towels and bathrobes. Apart from the bathrobes, we had no choice but to use each of these amenities. Yes, the mattress in the infinite veranda on the preview sailing was way too firm, but we chalked that up to being a brand new, not-broken-in mattress, not that it wasn’t cashmere. Everything else didn’t feel like a massive step up.
We used occasionally
The Retreat Lounge always has drinks available and snacks at different times of day. There is a bar, comfortable seating, and a Retreat Concierge to help with reservations and a variety of other things. On this sailing we visited the lounge just a couple of times, right after embarkation to reserve specialty dining and once for the Officers’ Soirée. We were so busy between ports, entertainment, and other activities it was never a priority. On the Apex sailing, however, we went more often, taking advantage of the afternoon snacks, the bar, the Retreat Concierge, and the outside seating it offered. How valuable this is to you entirely depends on your likes and dislikes and your priorities given all that’s going on during your sailing.
The Retreat Sundeck on Edge-class ships has a pool, hot tubs, bar, loungers, seating, tables, and crew coming by to take your order. We went once on this sailing, chilling in the shade with a book. Again, we were pretty busy doing other stuff, and — full disclosure — we don’t take advantage of cruise ship pools or hot tubs very often.
Sky Suites come with a complimentary minibar stocked with soda and beer on embarkation day and water restocked daily. Our butler Vengai asked if there were particular items we preferred. By the next day our fridge was laden with cans of Coke Zero and Fresca. With a drink package and room service, this was more a matter of convenience, though having the waters handy to bring on shore excursions was nice.
We thought we’d use, but didn’t
With stops in Mykonos and Santorini, two extremely popular tender ports, we were fired up to take advantage of Priority Tender access. We wouldn’t have to line up super early to ensure we got a good tender time. But then, we had booked an afternoon excursion in Santorini, and didn’t leave the ship until after lunch when the tender took us to Athinios port, bypassing the cable car line. Still. Mykonos, right? Well, if you read the Mykonos trip report, you probably noticed that when we went to the Grand Plaza at 9 AM, there was no wait for a tender for anyone.
Just like in the Apex, when we arrived in our Sky Suite, a welcome bottle of bubbles awaited us on the coffee table. So sweet. We never opened the bottle. Maybe we should have, but we were on the move and had lots of other drinking to do!
Lastly, the Retreat staterooms give you a Pillow Menu, from which you can try feather, foam, body (long), down, isotonic, and hypoallergenic. When Rona asked the stateroom attendant on the Apex (or maybe it was the butler) about it they didn’t know what she was talking about. We didn’t even think to ask about it on the Xcel.
Didn’t use
So there’s a Destination Experience Specialist. This is supposed to be like your butler but for the destinations, not the ship. They are basically a dedicated shore excursions expert and can create a curated experience for you, also called a Private Journeys shore excursion. Research freaks that we are, we book our excursions long before embarkation. Perhaps they’d have had a better response for us as compared with the shrug we received from the ship’s shore excursions desk after our downer of a Malta excursion. We will never know.
Even more fancy is the suite-to-car butler escort on Private Journeys shore excursion. So you have to book one of these bespoke excursions with the Destination Experience Specialist, and your butler will walk you from your suite to wherever the vehicle is at the port. That wasn’t us, but Vengai did walk us off the ship and along the pier in Kusadasi. We were never sure why other than he was a great guy.
We’re not that fancy
Finally, we have the perks you only get if you stay at a level above Sky Suite. First, you have the benefits of booking an Aqua Sky Suite. An Aqua Sky Suite compares to a Sky Suite the way an Aqua Class stateroom compares to an Infinite Veranda.
Aqua Sky Suite
- Dedicated spa concierge & personal consultant
- Complimentary fitness classes
- Aqua restaurant
- Access to The Spa’s SEA Thermal Suite
Royal Suites and above
- Complimentary laundry & pressing service
- Extend your stay on debarkation day, including lunch at Luminae
- Unlimited Specialty Dining
- Two complimentary bottles of premium spirits or wine
- Premium in-suite coffee set-up
- Exclusive complimentary sleepwear
Apex vs Xcel: Is Retreat Consistent Across Edge Class Ships
In general, the Retreat experience is quite similar across Edge-class ships with some differences based on the age and size of the ship. Every venue and perk mentioned so far is available, though the scope and size of the venues can differ.
The Xcel is larger than the Apex and has more suite cabins, resulting in around 50 additional Retreat guests on a full sailing. Celebrity increased capacity across the Retreat venues on the newer, “stretched” Edge-class ships, including the Xcel, Beyond, and Ascent. The Apex is similar in capacity to the Celebrity Edge.
Luminae Restaurant is close to twice the size on the Xcel, with a sweeping windowed curve, as opposed to the fully forward-facing view on the Apex. The Retreat Lounge is larger on the Xcel, but it does not have the small dedicated outdoor coffee patio we enjoyed on the Apex. However, whereas the Apex has a single-level Retreat Sundeck, the Xcel has an expanded multi-level Retreat Sundeck, with more areas that are similar to the outdoor patio from the Apex’s Retreat Lounge. Overall, the Xcel has the largest Retreat footprint in the entire fleet.
Was it Worth It?
You can’t write a Celebrity Retreat review without answering this question. That answer? Yes. This time. It isn’t always.
On the Apex last year, which was the first sailing off its 2025 dry dock and also a repositioning cruise, we wound up in a Sky Suite via the Move Up program. We upgraded to the suite from a Concierge Infinite Veranda for $1,260. This saved us more than $400 off the price of the Sky Suite booked outright. For all the move-up details, check out our post on the Celebrity Move Up Program.
On the highly sought after preview sailing of the Xcel, we opted for a Guaranteed Infinite Veranda and chose not to bid for an upgrade due to a variety of unfavorable factors. The upgrade itself was too costly relative to the price of our current stateroom and duration of the cruise.
However, on the 2026 Mediterranean sailing of the Xcel, we booked a Sky Suite outright. This cost us around $1,000 more than booking an Infinite Veranda combined with a premium drinks and Wi-Fi upgrade. In the end it’s not too dissimilar to the cost to upgrade to the Retreat on the Apex.
It would seem that for a 7-night sailing, Rona and I are willing to spend between $1,000 and $1,250 more for a Sky Suite than an Infinite Veranda with premium drinks and Wi-Fi. We love Luminae, and appreciate most of the other amenities to the point that we might actually miss even the ones that we’ve used the least. Does that make sense? Leave a comment one way or the other.
Also, just remember, was it worth it is a very different question than, if you could, would you stay in the Retreat every time? The answer to that is also yes, every time, and always.
Keep an eye on the Xcel Mediterranean 2026 page or subscribe down below to be notified when the next trip report goes live. Next up is our Dining Roundup, so stick around!