Divina Off today Western. My opinions....

10/15/2016 sailing

We are early 50s with 40+ cruises on many lines including MSC competitor Costa and European sailings as well.

These are my observations and opinions.

We were given a Black match. Check in was easy, we were told no special area for Black card members which did not matter as it was 10 minutes, but it seems odd and the crew did not seemed to know much about anyhting unless it was their specific job. Could also be a language barrier

We had an aft Balcony on deck 9. The room was nice sized and identical to NCL Jewel class and Epic. The ship is very nice overall with its European flare evident all over. We had a larger foreign base of passengers than Americans.

I am not going to go over every aspect but just to touch on the positives and negatives as I experienced them. We did have the bar package.

Positives.

Embarkation

Debarkation ( self assist 6.40 walk off)

Ship condition, overall layout

Buffet selection

Pizza +++++

Tour offerings

Bar availability

TV shows

Almost no announcements over PA

Great crew

Better shower design than we have experienced before.

Music everywhere

Fantastic solo singer in pizza bar area everynight

Casino was empty most of the time I won a few Hundred.

Negatives...(and mostly things that don't make sense)

Galaxy restaurant. This was so bad I will do a separate post for it.

Steak house. Good food, fast service, but your view is of the life boats and you sit on plastic lawn furniture style chairs

Deck 7 layout feeds you through the Golden jazz bar right across dance floor

Dance lessons each day in the Disco or Black and White were Waltz, Bachata, Reggeton, Rumba, and a few others. The problem is they never played that music for that style anywhere.

The entertainment staff. At the nightly parties they monopolize the dance floor with themselves. They are all in a circle basically.

They had music everywhere but no dance floors except for Golden and Black and White.

Main band played more latin than anything else ( Europeans outnumbered Americans 2-1). When there are 6 people in the place you might want to play what they want instead of listening to yourself play. When you play a slow song and everyone dances, you don't play other stuff that NO one dances to over and over.

Lack of daily activities. Night was fine overall

Bottle neck thru photo gallery all the time due to layout and forced walk thru

Shows....

We disliked all but the last two nights. We felt like we were at a dance recital or showcase. The last 2 shows had some acrobats, magic, popular songs (Michael Jackson night) ect. Many people loved them all but they are subjective to each persons likes and dislikes.

No Comedy no Magician shows like on CCL or NCL.

Would we sail with them again? Probably not, unless itinerary appealed to us or price was a steal.

Yes we had an OK time and I am glad we tried them. The black perks were Ok and it did get us to try them,but they also did not make sense to us.

2 bottles of chilled champagne delivered at the same time. 2 big Chocolate ships delivered on 2nd to last day of cruise. Free photo only good when taken in main dining room on Italian night. (we had Steak house reservations that night)

I don't know if any of these are sailing specific or not but it was what we experienced.

Steve

Thank you for the review. Several things I did not know and we have sailed Divina three times. Good info!

Thank you for the balanced review. Like you, I would sail MSC again for the right price, as I believe the product is a good value. However; if cost was similar, MSC would not be my chosen line.

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Thanks for the review.