peder

Our experience on sea days on the Seascape was that it was quite busy. We sailed in February on a very full ship, and everyone wanted to be outside enjoying the unseasonably great weather. So it probably depends on how full the ship is and how the weather is.

There were some posts about the Starlink rollout on the Euribia, and folks were consistently getting great speeds with low latency throughout most of the ship. There's always a chance that you'll have issues with VPN, but on other MSC ships I've personally not run into any issues with my company's VPN. There is a "business centre", but I believe it's more of a conference room that's used for larger meetings: Per CruiseMapper: "Business Centre (size 721 ft2 / 67 m2, Conference Hall / Meeting Rooms)" And per CruiseDeckPlans, it looks like this (https://www.cruisedeckplans.com/ships/shiptour.php?r=13192😞 And per the MSC official ship tour video, it looks like this (https://youtu.be/RF6bqeKUZBo?si=BFBKX8yKnMgrI7o6&t=780 Likely the difference between the CruiseDeckPlans photo and the MSC photo is that they are different rooms, because the second photo here is clearly has a window whereas the other is in an interior space. Neither appears to have a printer or really any space for someone to work for a while. They're just meeting spaces, probably used most often by the crew.

Curious if anyone here has sailed on MSC and can compare the Sun Princess Enclave to the MSC Aurea Spas on their newer ships. Maybe no ice room? No salt room? But otherwise a couple differnet type of steam rooms? How crowded has the Enclave been?

And maybe not even prematurely. They might just list even the ships that are optioned: MSC might be reserving/holding an option to use those dates in case they want to position the Bellissima there.

Why specifically is the Preziosa considered great but nobody seems to mention the Divina/Splendida/Fantasia in the same way?

Just FYI for anyone reading this thread, do not assume that a non-American sailing will have NFL games. We've done Western Europe and Japan sailings that had very limited English-language programming. Not unexpected, but our TV was effectively just a piece of wall decor.

It's like MSC started without any preconceived notions of what should be available on a cruise line and approached the entire concept differently. I guess if you don't overstock wine or spirits, you are less likely to dump out half-finished bottles at the end of a sailing. If you don't overstock, you need less storage space overall. And most customers must not care about getting specific brands at the bars or must not care about having a ton of TV channels because MSC has no trouble filling their ships despite some peculiarities. And that extra scrutiny on unnecessary cost allows MSC to be a price leader.

Definitely Riviera during the winter months, but summertime they might have some other plans.

No Bellissima on the Alaska cruise schedules for 2025 yet, but I'm not sure if that's finalized: https://claalaska.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/All-Alaska-Ports-All-Vessels-2025.pdf Would the Bellissima do something else on the west coast besides Alaska?

And an Alaska route probably depends on Russia sanctions?

Probably depends on how far south they start the trip. NCL has done routes like this between Tokyo and the West Coast:

So a repositioning cruise from Japan to LA with a stop in Hawaii? That'll be a popular one.

Premium Suite Aurea on the Virtuosa is great with kids because of the bunk area that's almost like its own room. Still much more affordable than a typical YC cabin with great balconies in the aft of the ship.

2026 itineraries for the Virtuosa are now live, but curiously, not the Winter 2025-2026 sailings. They've only released the spring-summer sailings.

Definitely *some* itineraries will be available tomorrow, maybe not all the ships though. This article says it's just the Virtuosa tomorrow: https://www.cruisehive.com/msc-cruises-to-open-new-uk-sailings-earlier-than-planned/125885 But last year most of the ships had their itineraries published pretty close together, so even if tomorrow it's just the Virtuosa, probably within 2-3 weeks most of the itineraries will be out.

Per Facebook MSC groups, tomorrow

One other interesting thing about the Bellissima and Splendida schedules is they might have gaps in the schedule when they are sailing exclusively in Chinese ports and selling exclusively in the Chinese market. If someone here had access to the Chinese WeChat, they'd probably see these itineraries spelled out on a travel agency page.

You can add Iceland / Norway / Mediterranean / Canary from Southampton for the Virtuosa in Summer 2026, per the MSC fan club - unofficial facebook group that shared a press release.

I guess I would say it's not thread creep because most ships homeporting on the west coast will embark out of San Diego or Los Angeles in the winter and Seattle in the Summer, so if MSC is planning on bringing a ship to Los Angeles, it also means they must have something figured out (i.e. a new terminal) in Seattle.

I'm not saying it's not reasonable. I'm just saying if they can't fill the ships after doing a ton of promotion, I'm not sure what other options they'll have besides deep discounting.

Gotcha. We had never seen availability of the 50%-off cabins (best we saw available was 30% off some Ocean Terrace cabins because the sailings we were looking at didn't have any more 50%-off cabins), and we were likely going to get a Penthouse and my understanding is that the discounts didn't apply to Penthouses and Residences? And I guess I'm mostly looking at what must be cheaper cruises in the low season. So with all that I probably just hadn't noticed the price jump. But Explora is marketing like crazy (I see their ads on YouTube incessantly), they're serving very "safe" routes with known demand, they've run big promotions, and they still can't fill these ships. Very rough start.

I'm still seeing prices in line with that? I didn't think they ever really ended their sales?

Thanks for the confirmation on GTY rooms and what you're seeing for availability. The ~5% per category is what I was seeing also, for sailings that I assume should be at least 25% sold by now. Pretty dismal numbers and suggests that more changes are inevitable. Which is exactly the problem IMO. We've put a hold on cabins 2x with Explora, but both times we've either gone with MSC YC or canceled our plans entirely, because we don't have enough faith that the product and itineraries will be the same by the time we get to the sail date. Maybe there'll be some heavy discounting in the near future.

Finally found a website that lets me check cabin availability, and when I hunt and peck, it looks like the vast majority of cabins are unsold on most cruises, even on popular sail dates like NYE. Is there a lull in booking now after some initial excitement with the brand launch? Frankly the cabin availability looks downright disastrous to me and not indicative of a brand that will survive. To be fair, maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. Maybe most cabin assignments are simply GTY rooms, so booking websites wouldn't show specific cabins as taken unless someone told Explora specifically which cabin they want? Or maybe there's an issue with the inventory APIs that these 3rd-party sites are using? 🤷‍♂️

Talking with crew, it sounds like many of them want to do US-based itineraries because compensation is higher. Tips are higher, and there's more shopping so commission-based roles have higher comp, too. I think many of their staff apply to be on US-based routes, so I'm guessing that's where most of their best talent ends up.