Divina Photo Package - Happy Customer

[KellyCz]

I returned yesterday from my first MSC cruise (second cruise ever; first was Oceania). It was a wonderful trip! I wanted to share some details about the photo package on board. I traveled with my husband and daughter (age 21), and we preordered the 10 photo package for $100. Not knowing what to expect, we figured it would be candid shots around the ship on various days. Also assumed it would be digital images. On our way to dinner on day 2, we saw photographers on deck 6 near the crystal staircase. We approached them and were whisked into a 30-minute photo session! My husband and I went to one side with a photographer and our daughter went to the other side with another. Then they put us all together. Then took some mom/daughter and dad/daughter shots. It was fun! The next day we were able to view the photos in the gallery on deck 7. There were upwards of 40 photos, all printed out in either 8x10 or 11x14 size. We went through and weeded out the ones we definitely didn't want. They held the rest for us until we were ready to make our final selections later in the week. On Elegant Night, we did another round. Got some great family, couple, and individual shots. And the family Christmas card photo is already checked off my to do list for this year. 🙂 There were some photo package specials during the cruise, but I didn't see any less expensive than the pre-cruise pricing. We had so many great shots that we ended up buying 10 more for $120 on the last night. Could have paid $110 during one of the specials, but we were waiting to see if there might be a better option. $220 for 20 prints from two separate sittings seemed like a good value to us. Very nice professional photos--much better than any we took of ourselves on the staircase, plus they put us in front of various backdrops as well. The only negatives were (1) a tremendous amount of wasted ink and paper from the thousands of photos that were not purchased, and (2) we had to be careful getting the prints home--especially since we chose four of the larger size. (They put them in an envelope, but no protective cardboard around them, and then in a large paper bag with a handle. I hand-carried it on the plane and got them home undamaged.) Digital format would solve both of those issues, and I understand digital are offered on other MSC ships, so we'll go that route if we have the chance in the future. Also, we saw photographers on Ocean Cay and in the Black Crab restaurant, but we didn't choose to be photographed there. I hope this is helpful to someone. QUESTION: Is this "photo session" style also done on other cruise lines?

[Nunagoras]

Nice review of an unusual topic. Congrats. Hope you have had a nice time! Can you report a little bit more? Were you in YC?

 

It surprises me that they remain selling paper photos in 2022, really! How I understand your 2 very sensitive caveats on that. It would to be easy for them to have some digital kiosks for guests to see the photos and to print only the ones they want, or simply to deliver them on a personalised USB pen.

 

Have a nice day!

[rkacruiser]

It's refreshing to read a positive report about the photographer's on a ship.  A rare report, indeed!  

[KellyCz]

3 hours ago, Nunagoras said:

Nice review of an unusual topic. Congrats. Hope you have had a nice time! Can you report a little bit more? Were you in YC?

 

It surprises me that they remain selling paper photos in 2022, really! How I understand your 2 very sensitive caveats on that. It would to be easy for them to have some digital kiosks for guests to see the photos and to print only the ones they want, or simply to deliver them on a personalised USB pen.

 

Have a nice day!

Thanks. We were not in YC; we had an Aurea suite. Booked in November when the free massage was still included in the package. 
 

We had a wonderful time! I’m planning to write a full review over the next couple of days.

[dexddd]

Not sure how full your sailing was, but when we sailed in September, many of the folks were bored so finding things to keep busy was important to staff whether servers or photographers.

 

Glad it worked out.

[Moaningman]

21 hours ago, Nunagoras said:

Nice review of an unusual topic. Congrats. Hope you have had a nice time! Can you report a little bit more? Were you in YC?

 

It surprises me that they remain selling paper photos in 2022, really! How I understand your 2 very sensitive caveats on that. It would to be easy for them to have some digital kiosks for guests to see the photos and to print only the ones they want, or simply to deliver them on a personalised USB pen.

 

Have a nice day!

There's an option now to buy all of them digitally - we've preordered the package for £87. Considering the amount that normally get taken I think that sounds reasonable 

[Nunagoras]

18 hours ago, Moaningman said:

There's an option now to buy all of them digitally - we've preordered the package for £87. Considering the amount that normally get taken I think that sounds reasonable 

That's a great option nonetheless, but the unique ships category on where I've seen similar offers has been the Meraviglia ones though!... Hope they expand that fleet wide. It makes far more sense to carry on an USB pen than a paper envelope, to say the least!...

[Moaningman]

4 hours ago, Nunagoras said:

That's a great option nonetheless, but the unique ships category on where I've seen similar offers has been the Meraviglia ones though!... Hope they expand that fleet wide. It makes far more sense to carry on an USB pen than a paper envelope, to say the least!...

Ah, that makes sense as we're on Virtuosa. It's our first MSC cruise so we're still learning

[Rossco01]

When we were on the Meraviglia in 2017 we bought in advance what was then the "100 photo" package ( I think it's now the digital package ) and we loved it....the photographers loved doing the photo shoot and every night we'd stop for 10-15 minutes chatting whilst they took photos...at the end of the holiday we just had to select 100 photos which were then all printed for us. It really was great.

 

I'm tempted to do the same for our Seaview holiday end of July but we've got a lot of OBC for this one with rolling over the cruise on last two years so I'm not sure what the photo package options would be on board. If anyone remembers let me know.

[AngryBirdah]

Great review!  The Legacy (i.e., Old) MSC Ships have no Digital.  The newer ships do, and the all-in Digital Photo Package is a great value (we did that on Seashore earlier this year).

 

Also, a cool thing I didn't realize before:  The higher your status, the more of a discount you get on photo packages onboard... even beating the price of pre-ordering!