Stellar of the Seas Cruise

The listings advertise Stellar of the Seas from $280 a person. The operator’s own tariff, read on 11 August 2026, puts the cheapest room on the one-night trip at $732 for a couple. Double the listing figure and you are still $172 short of that. The usual direction on this site is the other way round, because the per-person number is normally the cheapest cabin halved and nothing more.

Almost every price we publish is a ceiling scraped off a listing. This one is not. Aclass keeps a tariff page with four grades on it, and these are the numbers on it: the junior suite at $732 per cabin for two, the senior at $851, the executive at $1,026, and the president suite at $2,040. There is a separate column for one person travelling alone, running from $477 to $1,326 by grade, which is unusual to publish at all. Halve the junior suite and you get $366 a head. That is the figure we would budget from, and it sits $86 above what the listings advertise.

The cabin count, settled by a line nobody reads

The same tariff page prices the whole boat for charter: twenty-two cabins, $18,711. That row matters more than it looks, because the size of this vessel is the thing our sources fight hardest about. Four listings say twenty-two cabins. Two say eight. One says fifty-five and one says eighteen. The operator’s own charter line counts twenty-two, and we read that as close to settled.

Capacity is where it stops being tidy. Sixty guests is the published number and only one source states it. Every grade on the tariff is priced for two adults, so twenty-two rooms come to forty-four berths. Sixty would need third beds, children, or a different boat. One guest who sailed puts it at forty people. A stranger’s aside is not a specification and we are not going to promote it into one, but it points the same way the arithmetic does.

What you are booking

A pool, a gym, a spa, kayaking, and a balcony on every cabin. All five are marked verified in our data, and it is worth knowing what that word does and does not mean: the operator plus at least two other sources saying the same thing, which is agreement rather than three people checking separately. Listings copy each other. Five of the twelve photographs published for this boat are of the pool deck, which tells you where the money went and what the sales pictures are proud of.

The jacuzzi is thinner than the ticked box suggests. It appears in the amenity list for the executive and president grades and in neither of the cheaper two, which get a bath instead. So if the jacuzzi is part of why you are paying, that is a $1,026 room and not a $732 one. The top two grades also trade the balcony for what the listing calls a private sun terrace. The one cabin photograph in the set shows a freestanding bath standing beside the bed, with glass running the width of the room, which is a particular taste and worth knowing in advance if you are sharing the cabin with your in-laws.

Cabin size we cannot give you straight. Three sources say 30 m², two say 28, two say 32, one says 60, and not one of them names the grade it is describing. Deck count, hull length and any refit since launch are unpublished. The 2018 launch year and the steel hull each rest on a single source.

Where it costs you

We collected 500 reviews for this boat and read them. All 500 are in English. Of those, 497 are five-star, one is four, and two are three. There is no one-star review and no two-star review anywhere in the set. Across the boats on this site we have not seen that shape before, and it is a problem for you rather than a recommendation: a 9.8 assembled like that gives you almost nothing to read.

Read what there is. Both critical guests land on the food. The complaint is that the menus lean European and arrive reheated rather than cooked, and one of them finds even the Vietnamese dishes at breakfast thin, which on this coast is a strange thing to get wrong. Both also paid for drinks. A cappuccino at brunch carried a charge on a trip sold as full board, and soft drinks are described as dear for the money. That matches the paperwork instead of contradicting it. Three of the sources we hold list beverages as excluded. The second guest adds that the printed itineraries handed out on board disagreed with each other, that the day is built tightly around meals, including a four-course dinner that runs an hour, and that the pool was heated on a hot summer afternoon. Someone chose that. It is not a fault, but it is not what you want in July either.

Two of the three guests who did not give five stars mention being asked for a review while they were still on the boat, one of them with staff names to include. We are not going to build a case about a company out of two accounts we cannot test, and we are not going to pretend we did not read them. They are on Google under the three-star filter, and there are only three of them. Ten minutes.

The four-star review is the practical one. Travelling with children, that guest found nothing on board aimed at them, a swimming slot that ended too soon, and a road transfer crowded enough that the luggage would not fit.

Included, excluded, and the one that is tied

Kayaking is in, confirmed three times over, which deserves saying because it is the inclusion most often dropped quietly between the listing and the day. The guide, the welcome drink, and the entrance and sightseeing fees are in. So is laundry, four items per room per night, stated by one source and mentioned by nobody else. Out: beverages, spa treatments, tips, and a surcharge over Christmas and the New Year.

The road transfer from Hanoi is the one to pin down. Three sources put it inside the price and three leave it outside, which is a tie rather than a consensus, and a tie usually means two agents are selling different products under one name.

The route, and getting to the right pier

The itinerary works the Cat Ba side of the archipelago rather than the main channel. Three Peaches Beach, the national park on Cat Ba, the pair of caves called Bright and Dark, and the village at Viet Hai, which guests reach by bicycle or electric buggy rather than by boat. If you have not yet chosen between the bays, how the three differ is the page to read before this one.

Boarding is at Tuan Chau Marina, and one source states that, so confirm it when you book. The Ha Long International Cruise Port is a different place about twenty minutes away in traffic, and drivers reverse the two often enough that you should say Tuan Chau out loud twice. One listing gives check-in at 12:10, check-out at 11:35 the next morning, and the coach back in Hanoi by 2:30pm. Single source, so treat those as an indication of shape rather than a timetable.

Who it suits

Couples buying a named grade at a tariff price, who want a deck and a pool at the top of the Lan Ha market and who will eat what they are given. On the pier and the route it is one of the stronger options on Lan Ha Bay.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone for whom dinner is half the holiday, and anyone travelling with children. Neither of those is a small objection at $366 a head, and the rest of the Lan Ha boats include ones with a thicker critical record you can actually learn something from.