Holy Ship! 2013

[chillyw]

Anyone else book this?

 

I've only cruised on Norwegian, but this is being chartered on the MSC Poesia. Any advice from the vets on room/food/etc?

 

Thanks!

[crayoncandy]

Hey Chilly! You're on Holy Ship? first timer? OG shipper here and I made a roll call! (Just days before you posted this lol) http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1648954 MszPolaris is an OG shipper too! What do you want to know? The rooms are fine, we had some problems with people blasting their ****ty ipod music on their balcony while we were trying to sleep, I mean there's like 5 venues playing music all the time and countless other places you could chill and blast your ipod, your balcony is not the place. I heard other people had the same problem and that if you asked the front desk they would enforce quiet by the rooms. Though man if you're the rooms that are just inside the pool deck doors I imagine it's never quiet! The food was very hit or miss IMO, we didn't eat in the MDR at all, it seemed like pretty much everyone was just hitting the buffet. I found about half of the buffet food to be straight up inedible. The other half was fresh fruit and veggies, good pasta, and amazing french fries. I mostly ate fries at the buffet. If you asked my bf, he would say that I am exaggerating so you know, take my opinion with a grain of salt haha. We did eat at the for fee Sushi venue twice and it was VERY VERY good. Honestly some of the best sushi I've ever eaten, I was very surprised! This year I do plan on eating at the upscale restaurant, I'd like to have a nice anniversary dinner while we're on vaca!

 

Anyway, yeah we packed quite a few rum runners amoung our bags and had no problems getting them on. Definitely kept the bar tab down. They sold packages of "drink tickets" last year, it was like, if you buy 12 drink tickets, it's only the cost of 11 drinks. Not much of a discount compared to the packages they offer regular cruisers. We decided the first day not to buy a package and just buy a few drinks and supplement with what we brought and the in room mini bar. Well, it turned out that on the last day at the private island, the only way to get drinks was to have drink tickets (maybe cash?) so then we wish he had just bought one. Bottom line, if you drink, you know you're gonna drink so just buy the package and use the tickets when it's convenient. I think they were also trying to cut down on lost Sail and Sign Cards because the bars were crazy busy and every POS I looked at had a stack of cards that people just walked away from!

 

All the parts of the cruise not affected by the charter were pretty much what I expected from reading reviews of MSC. Management was very european and often seemed aloof and snooty, above helping their staff. I have no idea where the rest of the staff was from, but they were mostly brown and short, a few languages barriers, but otherwise they were very hardworking! I think a lot of them were in training, or not used to US sailings, or I think some of them slacked since we were not the usual crowd, but it was fun to see them gettin down to all the music! Things also may not have been running quite right with service since we did run aground on that reef for like a whole day.

 

Anyway, that was a lot of rambling, come join us on the other thread!