For years I've taken the Hornblower brunch cruise and really enjoyed it. At the place where I buy my tickets, a sales rep had been trying to convince me to try Flagship's brunch cruise instead. She said "The food is better." This past weekend I had friends visiting from out of town, so I finally decided to book the Flagship brunch cruise for the four of us. That was a big mistake for the following reasons:
1) On Hornblower, we've always been seated at our own table. For example, when it's just been the two of us, we've been seated at our own table. When there's been four of us, we've always had our own table as well. Flagship, on the other hand, sat everyone at tables made up of 9 or 10 people. That made it difficult for the four of us to converse privately among ourselves (we were seated in a row around a large table as opposed to across from each other.) It's a much more intimate dining experience on Hornblower.
2) There's a wider variety of foods on Hornblower. For example, Hornblower serves several different kinds of seafood dishes and salads - from shrimp cocktail to salmon to crab salads and more. Flagship only served shrimp cocktail and caviar that was far too salty to be enjoyable. Hornblower serves a variety of egg dishes including fried, scrambled, Eggs Benedict, and omelets; the only eggs I saw on Flagship were scrambled.
3) The portions of food were very limited on Flagship. The shrimp cocktail, for example, was served individually. Each shrimp sat in its own little plastic cup. If we wanted to eat three shrimps, we had to load our plates up with three plastic cups of shrimp. It was strange - I had never seen shrimp served that way in my life. Hornblower, on the other hand, serves its shrimp in a huge mound (large bowl.) There are tongs there to serve yourself as many shrimps as you want - all at once.
Salads were served on the buffet table sitting in very small bowls. Each bowl held enough salad to serve 2 or, at most, 3 people. It made us feel really guilty if we took too much, because we didn't want to empty the bowls and deprive others of getting any.
My other half spotted pecan pie at the dessert table when we first boarded, which is his favorite. By the time he finished breakfast, however, that one pecan pie was gone and was never replaced. He was so disappointed!
There were other examples of very limited quantities, but I can only type so much!
4) The quality of the food was inferior on Flagship to that on Hornblower. The cocktail sauce that the shrimps were swimming in on Flagship had a watery consistency with no taste. Hornblower's cocktail sauce is thick and just spicy enough. The scrambled eggs were cold and tasteless. I asked our server for some salt to bring out the flavor (none of the tables had salt and pepper shakers on them.) I had to remind him twice and he finally delivered a chrome salt shaker that had dirty finger print marks all over it.
My other half ordered a glass of cranberry juice. It was pink instead of red because they had watered it down so much. He didn't finish drinking it.
5) The beverage service on Flagship was very slow compared to that on Hornblower.
In summary, Hornblower has a much wider variety of food in greater quantities, and its quality is far superior to that of Flagship's. The service is also much better on Hornblower. With such stark differences in quality and quantity, I can't imagine why the ticket seller would recommend Flagship over Hornblower. That is, unless she's somehow being rewarded for selling more Flagship cruises.