I have not noticed any special treatment for the highest cabin category passengers. Not saying there isn’t any but if there is it’s not obvious or over the top. Part of it might be the passengers themselves and their personal requirements. I know on Silversea once you’re on the ship the treatment is pretty evenhanded and you don’t see any obvious preferential treatment. On our cruise last year we met an English couple who were really friendly and what I would call “salt of the earth”. We were on board with them for 18 days and ate lunch with them several times and a couple of dinners. They got on in Rome with us but we found out through just casual conversation they were in an owner’s suite and still had 99 more days on the ship when we got off. Whatever they did for a living they did it well. On a cruise a few years ago we and friends were kind of adopted by this very large American family, like 20+ members, that turned out had booked every upper end cabin on the ship. Again just normal folk. Turned out these “normal folk” live in Thailand and own one the largest construction companies in Asia.

Having not cruised Seabourn yet I wasn’t aware of a special line and don’t recall one for Silversea. Truth is we’ve arrived at Silversea cruise terminals in Barcelona, Civitavecchia (Rome), Piraeus (Athens), Istanbul, Venice, San Juan, and Ft Lauderdale at a variety of times from early in the morning to mid afternoon and never experienced long lines. All in all I’d say we’ve checked in and boarded in as little as 10-15 minutes and maybe once 40 minutes but that was because we got to the terminal so early the terminal wasn’t even open. Big difference between boarding a few hundred on a relatively smaller luxury line ship to up to a few thousand on mass market line.

While I gave examples of two down-to-earth families and couples we’ve met I should have said indeed we’ve met just couple of don’t-you-know-who-I-am types. Fortunately we’ve met more of the former than the later. Easy to avoid and since at least on Silversea it’s basically open dining in a number of venues where you’re not assigned a fixed table at a fixed time you’re not stuck with potentially uncomfortable dining companions.

That’s also true if you use cruise line provided pre-cruise hotel arrangements. Our experience with that has been from awful to excellent. Awful was a last minute cruise out of Ft Lauderdale and we couldn’t find reasonable accommodations ourselves. Opted for a Holland America hotel and that included transfers to the terminal. That turned out to be a madhouse of loading four 40-passenger buses with not only the people but luggage too. Excellent was a Silversea hotel in Rome. Embarkation morning Silversea had contracted a transfer company that picked up my wife and I and our friends in Rome. They sent a luxury Mercedes limo van with individual leather seats for the four of us and offered us coffee and champagne for the almost two hour trip to the port.

We’ve gotten that same level of service on Silversea even on shorter cruises. Of course they are dealing with a much smaller population than the mass market lines. What we found remarkable was we cruised on the Silver Wind in 2014 and then switched to the Silver Spirit in 2015. Turned out the same server from the Wind in 2014 was on the Spirit in 2015 and he remembered our drinks. Funny that in now seven cruises with Silversea we now have favorite servers, bartenders, and cruise directors who we remember and remember us from cruise to cruise ship to ship. It’s touches like that that keep us coming back.

While the cruise line comes from a corporation with hotel experience all over the world I suspect there is a learning curve. Certainly they most probably have hired experienced management, staff, and crew from other cruise lines but they still have to bring them together to support and run a new line in whatever the Ritz Corporation sees as its “at sea” image. Even drawing on a fairly substantial existing cruise line support cottage industry they still have to find and contract port agents who in turn can help them with reprovisioning, refueling, etc., etc. Lots of moving pieces and parts to pull together and maybe better to gain experience in a well known area than get too adventurous.