Fla Mike

We are going the week after. Looking forward to your review.

We did two MSC cruises in the past year. One on the Divina, and on on the Meraviglia. The Divina cruise was hands down one of our favorites... gorgeous ship, absolutely beautiful. A fantastic crew, with service to match. Beautiful stateroom, (aft facing balcony) The Meraviglia on the other hand was a loser from the minute we walked into the terminal, (both cruises left from PC). From the mandatory COVID test (cruise was in Feb during the last surge) that they "must have misplaced" after we sat there for an hour, to the check-in agent insisting we had four people in our room because he had four key cards. Of course, after we got it straight, he gave us the wrong ones. Had to go back to the desk twice to get the cards to work cause they couldn't figure it out either. I asked our room steward for a sharps container as I am diabetic, he had no clue. Had to find another steward to explain it to him. The topper was the drink package, It was included, We are not big drinkers but I like Jamesons on the rocks. No Jamesons. OK give me a Jim Beam. They come back with a Canadian Club and tell me they are out of most of the booze on the plus package and to drink this or upgrade, very snotty and left. This was at dinner. So now this waiter totally ignores us for almost an hour before he takes our order. I get the Maitre'd and he also had a major attitude. Finally, after we left I got hold of the hotel manager and he comped the upgrade to our beverage package. You get the picture

The 2/1 sale intrigued me, so Lovey and I spent quite a bit of time looking at all the boob tube reviews on the reimagined “Margaritaville at Sea Paradise”, (yes, that is the ships official name now) these last few days and we decided to give it a try in September. I know there has been some discussion surrounding price, with some pointing out that a three or four nighter on Carnival or MSC is just about the same price, and I did find that to be correct…for the base price. But we took a few other factors into consideration as we pondered our cruise fate. A three-night cruise on the Carnival Liberty, the same weekend, was exactly the same price. Now that is taking into account my VIFP discount and also adding the $12.00 pp per night fuel surcharge that BPCL (it really is the same line) is adding to the bill. So, $129.00pp base cost, for an Oceanview makes the Liberty a no brainer? Well, not so fast we discovered. A few things that helped sway us towards “Margaritaville at Sea Paradise” On the Carnival cruise the port charges are approx. $40pp more Onsite parking is $24 more, (we don’t do off site) YMMV An extra day at the kennel for the pooch, $65. We also figured about and extra $50. on booze as one ten drink coupon will do us on “Margaritaville at Sea Paradise” as opposed to paying on Carnival. (We just do not drink enough to justify Cheers). So, the way we looked at it the extra night would actually cost us around $219 more. The final thing, for us at least, was, do we really want to do a weekend cruise on Carnival? In my opinion that is just asking for too much. We do cruise Carnival, at least once a year but on four-night minimums. We just came off the Freedom last month on the last cruise before “The Fire”. The crowd on that sailing obviously has not had much outside contact other humans. Never saw a crowd like that one before, and that was our third Carnival cruise since the restart. I will not even mention our last MSC cruise on Meraviglia. Anyway, this was just going to be a short getaway until our November cruise on Celebrity Edge and since we live in St Lucie County anyway, “Margaritaville at Sea Paradise” won. We haven’t been on a BPCL ship since the Grand Celebration a few years ago. Do a boob tube search on “Margaritaville at Sea Paradise” you may come away surprised. I’ll let everyone know what WE think afterwards.

Very good, fair, and honest review. Most of the problems he mentioned are do to the age of the ship. We will most likely give it a try now but wait until later in the summer.

Thinking about Jimmy's best selling album and also a Number One Song More than a few Parrot Heads are grabbing their chests 😵

I found this very odd.. so I cannot enter Canada unless I download an app to my phone? There are folks that refuse to use a smart phone, ( I am not one of them), so are they SOL? No they are not. The letter Greg received also has a link to the Arrive Can Website. It seems, although I did not actually complete the sign-up process, that this can be done on a desktop by scanning all required info and then printing out you QR Code.