I had a few similar experiences on the MSC Seascape in September 2023. I’ve cruised with other cruise lines and this was my worst experience thus far. We upgraded the room at an additional cost. When we arrived, we were disappointed with the size of the room. It seemed like all the additional space was on the balcony. With three of us in the room we had the couch pulled out leaving just a path in the room. Disappointing to say the least. In the shower you couldn’t bathe without touching the door or wall, or in some cases the faucet. In comparison, when we upgraded on Carnival the year prior, we had a tub with plenty of bathing space. I called the cruise line before we got there with questions. Not being able to bring any hair appliances seemed crazy. They actually suggested going to the salon on board for hair services, of course that’s an additional cost.
Our issues stemmed from not seeing our room attendant until day three. I think that only happened because we were looking for our bottle of champagne that had disappeared and called the front desk. In doing so, we also commented that we hadn’t met our attendant and had speculated who it was during the first two days (we were wrong). We had to repeatedly call the get supplies for three people. We needed three sets of towels and three champagne glasses, etc. Also, cleanliness was an issue. After leaving the ship to go on land, we came back to see a wad of hair on the floor near the trash can. I stopped my friend from picking it up and called the front desk. A supervisor came and we explained the numerous issues that we had gone through with the room attendant, namely her absence. She came and vacuumed the hair after I questioned her about her having cleaned the room already.
There were only two issues that we experienced while dining. The first being the call buttons at the table used to call staff for issues and drink orders in the general dining space. No one ever seemed to be able to get the tables correct leaving us parched during our meals and leading to lengthy waits. We were given every excuse in the book including the system went down and the tablets being used had not been updated to reflect the correct table numbers. This was a huge issue that caused long wait times throughout the cruise in the main dining areas. I quickly learned to serve myself as much as possible in an effort to not have to rely on the staff. Some staff did have attitudes and occasionally lied directly to our faces which resulted in us requesting a supervisor. Unfortunately, the supervisors didn’t do much of anything.
The second issue was the rudeness of the other passengers. Being about based out of Europe, there were a lot of Europeans on board and unfortunately cultural differences were noted. They prefer to cut in line and reach across folks with saying excuse me.
We literally only missed one meal during our 5 day (I believe) cruise and that was dinner. I don’t recall any extremely bad food. There was an issue with sausage. We had seated breakfast a few days when we had an early start. One person in our crew doesn’t eat pork so he also requests turkey sausage. The crew didn’t seem to know the difference and a manager had to be called. I requested wheat toast and was brought white. Then I was told that they didn’t have wheat. The next day in the same dining room, I requested and received wheat toast.
For us, the cruise was bearable because we had some exclusivity with the Aria package which was part of our upgrade. We had access to an upper level sun deck with hot tubs and a bar. We planted ourselves at the bar and hung out with Kevin from St. Lucia for days on end. We found out from someone in the Yacht Club that you should not do MSC unless you’re in the Yacht Club. He said it’s the only way it’s worth the money. He happened to be in a situation where he basically bid on his Yacht Club room and got it for an additional $500.
Sadly, the money machines scattered around the boat rarely worked so after spending an exorbitant amount of time feeding rejected bills into several different machines, we ultimately got the job done at Guest Services.
I took copious note regarding the dates, times and names of the subpar experiences. When I got back home, I perused the website several times and was disappointed that there was nowhere to submit complaints and alert the cruise line of the disappointments of our trip.
