peder

And the $5 surcharge can make an enormous difference in food quality and level of service. I think some passengers were abusing the additional free entrees, leading to logjams in the kitchen and probably starving other tables of attention for their servers. It's small enough of a price difference that it rounds down to zero relative to the cost of the entire trip, yet it's probably enough of a disincentive to order excessively that it improves dinner for everyone.

Maybe that's all I'm asking for here. We love that room category and would probably book more with MSC if we could just have that room in the Yacht Club. But also a shame that this category is non-existent on the Meraviglia- and World-class ships.

The one thing I wish MSC would offer is the ability to purchase the YC experience when booking an Aurea suite (probably sans butler). There are cabins like the Grand Aurea Suites for which there really isn't a comparable YC cabin. Or they need to make it possible to book two cabins under one name, so I could get a small deluxe cabin in YC to secure YC benefits *and* and a Grand Suite Aurea to use as a sleeping/living space.

Is there a chance there'll be a significant refocusing on western med + caribbean by all cruise lines? Maybe leading to an oversupply of cruises in those areas?

What's the process for getting a new bathrobe? Just toss it with your towels and then they'll restock a clean bathrobe? Or do folks ask for new ones?

We are Aurea (and actually had been Yacht Club, we made a change) and Specialty Dining packages weren't available for pre-purchase at either experience level.

Reviving this thread because I'm curious if anyone else is running into this. We only have 1 upcoming sailing, on the Euribia next summer, and there's no option to purchase specialty dining. We have never bought a specialty dining package previously, but I was thinking of gifting it for family members that will be coming along the trip with us, but can't exactly do that if they don't even sell it on the website 🤪

Somewhat unrelated just for reference for folks that stumble on this thread, we have sailed on both the Seashore (Western Med) and Seascape (Caribbean) and we found that there were different age requirements for the waterslides. Whereas my 5 year old could go on the racing slides on the Seascape, she was told she needed to be 7 to go on them on the Seashore.

I like their breakfasts a lot too. The roasted tomatoes on top of an over easy egg? Yum. But the sausage we had in our western med circuit was far from the typical sausage you'd find stateside. Wasn't an issue for us, but I see how others would use that as an example for why MSC food is not up to par.

Critiques of food on MSC I think often come down to very simple things. Things like breakfast sausage on an MSC cruise are very far from American expectations. So when someone goes from a line like Carnival with a Guy Fieri quick service restaurant over to MSC, I can imagine it's a bit of a shock.

Is this for every sailing date or just one?

What do you mean their cabins are linked to your reservation? Just in terms of seats at dinner? Or do they have another way to view their reservations alongside yours?

They're slowly building out their site and capabilities. They just added digital boarding passes on their app, which I'm guessing was a big project internally. Now that they're operating at the same scale as many of the other lines, I think they'll continue to invest in this space.

We don't know what flag they're using behind the scenes and what pricing function they'll use with that flag. For instance, they might be marking cruises ahead of a sale, but we don't know how the sale will work. It might just be linked to an onboard credit for all we know.

We added a second cabin once we were on board and that did count toward Voyagers Club

No, not too windy. Breezy for sure at night, but during sunlight hours I assume they slow down? My wife and I made a habit of hanging out in the cabana things after dark with wine that we had brought from up ourselves after the bar had closed.

Yep, it's exclusive. You can access it from outside and also from the elevator area that would lead to the Yacht Club. There's a bar there that's open most of the time (though it does close a bit early). The exclusive solarium was pretty quiet and typically had open seats when we were there. Sea days it fills up quite a bit. Also yes, there's a separate dining room.

Who knows? We never saw ours! 😅 Note that I'm not complaining about above, we had mostly great service. My impression is that everyone in YC was willing to help with anything.

That self-service area might be specific to just the Seaside (and possibly Seaview)

I would use chat for nearly all customer service interactions if I could. I think it's easier for both the agent and the customer to be on the same page with the written word... much less opportunity to be misunderstood.

I know there was a bar, but are you talking about self-service beer/wine/soda dispensers?

When we were on the Seascape and Seashore I never once saw these. I'm totally baffled.

Wait a minute, they have soda machines? Where?

Why would MSC not offer chat support in this day and age? It seems like it would cut down on the vast majority of their communication issues and reduce their costs significantly at the same time.

And just to add to the nonsense. It looks like some sort of batch processing job has now run and a different set of adjoining cabins on the same deck is now showing that had never previously appeared at all!