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Everything’s Going Splendidly on Splendida - Dubai-Yokohama 2018


Beamafar
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We are now in Dubai facing our 8 hour wait for our flight to Dublin. Emirates no longer offer the hotel room rest and we would have to get a visa to leave the airport if we wanted to get a room, so we'll just stay in the seating area with the nice relaxing seats and rest for the morning

 

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CF ... a follow-up to the 'handbag situation' on Emirates.

 

I'd bought a cheap holdall in one of the ports and decided to chance putting the smaller bag that I'd originally carried on in Dublin into it along with other items. Our suitcases were bursting at the seams as were our 2 cabin bags (despite the fact that we bought nothing!).

 

While queuing to check-in in Tokyo, I watched how others' handluggage was being treated by the clerks. It seemed as though they were being weighed, so I figured I was in trouble as our bags were both way over the 7kg allowance.

 

I then noticed an older woman at a check-in desk struggling to remove items from a bag and put them in another. It seems she was not being allowed take 2 bags on with her. A bag, similar in size to my holdall (and not much sturdier) was then taken from her to be put into the hold. "I'm in trouble now", I thought and began frantically removing a bulky wool jacket and DH's jumper & jacket from one of the cabin bags, just in case.

 

At the desk, we put the suitcases up - between the 2 they weighed 59.1Kg! So our combined allowance of 60kgs was practically used up. Next thing, the girl took 1 of the cabin bags and put it in on the scales - I couldn't see the display, so anxiously watched for her reaction. She looked over at our other cabin bag (which had even more weight in it!) and, to my utter amazement, suggested that we would be ok if I could find room in one of the bags to put the holdall in as we could only bring one bag each onboard! She even suggested to take out any bulky jackets, etc to do it. I assured her that I could manage that and we left the counter with what must have been at least 25kg between the 2 cabin bags. Whew!!

 

After we went through security, I removed the holdall and put back the items I'd originally had in it and put our bulky jackets back in the bags. I had no problems getting on the plane!

 

I'll never understand this one bag policy with Emirates as handbags/holdalls and flight bags (we have 2 terrific ones which we didn't bring because of this) will fit under the seat in front of you, so, why does it matter having something of that size along with a cabin bag, which you're going to stash in the overhead lockers, anyway.

 

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Bea

 

Welcome home -- what a long time you have been travelling and sat in that b****y awful seat.

Thanks for the info on Oz shiraz, our cruise next year on Preziosa YC we can check it out if its available.

 

Your flights made us start looking at Emirates and other airlines for next year and although not available yet we have a good idea of flight times and prices.

 

Thanks for your postings

Liz

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Thoroughly consistent with the cabin baggage policy then! I'd most certainly have been fearful with your luggage :o

 

Thankfully they didn't weigh our cabin bags at Dubai, nor did anyone say anything as I had a cabin bag and a handbag. I thought ours were over weight but they would've been quite light compared to yours, although you were away for a much longer period.

 

I think it's far more sensible to be allowed a small bag to go under the seat and a cabin bag or you find yourself causing a delay after boarding getting your handbag back out for the flight. Obviously, the problem is those that take advantage and board with 2 large bags.

 

I just flew Birmighmam to Belfast on an airline with a one bag policy, half of us had 2 and no-one was stopped.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry, folks - I've been a bit busy elsewhere for the last while and haven't been on the forum, so missed the latest posts. Thanks for the concern. All's well, I'm glad to report. :)

 

Darcy - I had a look at your itinerary for next year and it looks like you'll be overnighting in Singapore, which means you won't experience the same problems that we did. I'm planning to continue with the report as soon as I get a chance - it won't be for another day or so as I'm quite busy at the moment.

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Thanks Darcy and CF. :) I plan to get back to it this weekend.

 

Mark ... I emailed you a couple of days ago - I've just received a notification from my email admin advising "Your message couldn't be delivered. Despite repeated attempts to contact the recipient's email system it didn't respond. Contact the recipient and ask them to tell their email admin that it appears that their email system isn't accepting connection requests from your email system. It's likely that the recipient's email admin is the only one who can fix this problem." I'll try and send the email again. Will you let me know if you receive it?

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So, to resume from where I left off (with apologies for the delay) …

The ship visited 5 ports in a row - Phuket, Langkawi, Penang, Port Klang and Singapore. We did excursions in #1, 2 and 4 and went to the Queensbay mall in Penang. We had decided not to go ashore in Singapore as we’ve been a few times before on land trips. However, Singapore officials put paid to that by insisting that all passengers must leave the ship by 11am and pass through passport control. Re-boarding would not be allowed before 11.45am! So we decided that we’d just take a taxi to Chinatown and hang out there for a couple of hours. We left it ’til 10.30am to head off, thinking that most people would have headed out early on excursions, etc. What a shock to see the queues ahead when we reached the terminal. It was crazy! It took us three-quarters of an hour to get through and out to the taxi rank!

Anyway, we pottered about the stalls in Chinatown and then had lunch at one of the restaurants, before heading back to the ship at 2pm. Big mistake! That’s the time that half-day excursions usually return. The terminal was packed with people and the queue was even worse than it had been earlier that day. To make matters worse, Ovation of the Seas (I think it was OOTS, anyway)was also in port so there were passengers from it trying to get back onboard, too.

There was a seating area with the seats arranged in such a way that the outer ones formed a kind of barrier in a rectangular shape with a gap between a couple of the outer ones here and there to access the inner seats. A queue had formed around the outside of this seating zone so I joined it and had DH take a seat (due to an old foot injury he wouldn’t have been able to stand for long). After about 15 minutes (in which the line hadn’t moved at all) a guy surfaced from somewhere, walked into the seating area and began waving cards in the air, calling “One per cabin, one per cabin”. At first, I assumed he was from Royal Caribbean, as they (unlike MSC!!!) had reps around the terminal to assist their passengers. It transpired that he was handing out numbers like they do at embarkation time. As DH was right beside the guy, I urged him to go grab a number before all those on the queue behind got the early ones. Obviously, this had caused chaos as everybody jumped the seats and surged forward as soon as they realised what was happening. Anyway, we ended up with a #2 card, which I was rather miffed at as I had been close to the top of the queue in this area. I don’t understand why the guy with the numbers hadn’t walked along the queue, handing out the cards in an orderly fashion.

I need to clarify here. The queue we were on was only the one being formed in the terminal. There were hundreds of people way ahead in another area where passport control was situated. We had been on a queue to join a queue!

We now had numbers to allow for us to be called in groups, which, at least, afforded everyone the opportunity to sit and wait. We got talking to a bloke who asked us if we’d seen the punch-up earlier on (it happened just before we arrived at the terminal, so, no, we didn’t see it). Apparently, some French and German (older!!) people got into a fisticuffs over queue-jumping. It seems that some were cutting through the seating area and walking diagonally across to join the queue on the other side of the L instead of just joining it at the end, which caused a near-riot. Security quickly came on the scene and it was pointed out to those involved of where they were and that Singapore is not a place in which to cause trouble!

In the meantime, I spotted a couple of girls who worked with MSC excursions and were fielding questions about the situation re passport control. I approached one of them and explained to her what had happened with the guy handing out the numbers cards; I also slipped in the fact that we were in YC and could she see her way to doing anything to prioritise us. She said “Let me see what I can do” and off she went. A few minutes later, she returned with a card bearing the numeral 1 on it. Almost immediately after swapping cards with her, Number 1 was called. Well, there was a scramble to form a new queue, with more chaos as some people, who hadn’t taken numbers and others with numbers other than #1 all tried to join the queue, too. Fortunately, we managed to join almost at the top.

This time, the queue began moving toward the entrance to the next area, thinking that, at last, we were near the end of the waiting ordeal. WRONG! We got to join a queue of hundreds which we couldn’t see beforehand, all snaking around (what seemed like) miles of ropelines. Soon after, a round of applause broke out at the front, but the sheer volume of people prevented us from seeing what was going on and I assumed that passport control had opened up more booths to deal with the crowds. Someone told us later that it was just meant as a sarcastic gesture to the officials rather than booing them for the disgraceful delays. When we eventually got to go through, it was obvious that the officials were in no hurry to get people through - in fact, quite the opposite.

It took over an hour for us to get back onboard from the time we had arrived in the terminal. Heaven knows how long it took others who weren’t lucky enough to get the #1 cards. Still, later we were glad we had returned when we did, as, typical in Singapore, while the weather in the morning was glorious, there was a torrential downpour later that afternoon.

You can just imagine the complaints onboard that ship that night! Of course, this happened BEFORE the later events of replacing Phu My (for Saigon/Ho Chi Minh) for Da Nang and missing Shanghai. We also had more trouble getting ashore in Hong Kong; we arrived at 8am but the ship didn’t get clearance ’til 11.25am, which, again, caused chaos - especially for those who had plans and excursions booked. Add to that, we arrived later into Yokohama than scheduled.

I believe that the experience in Singapore was a turning point for the atmosphere onboard. It didn’t help that there was a real downturn in the weather from there, with poor conditions preventing use of the sundecks on several days and the news, while we were at sea the day after Singapore, that the following day’s visit to Phu My was to be replaced with another day at sea and that the day after - which was to be a sea-day - we would be visiting Da Nang. It's no wonder that MSC felt the need to give a whopping 50% off a future cruise. Though, as I said before, none of the problems we encountered were in any way MSC's fault.

I feel, looking back, that, had the cruise ended in Singapore, it would have been a terrific cruise. While it wasn’t one of our worst, it wasn’t one of our outstanding ones, either.

 

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Hi Bea

Singapore Immigration seem to have a rule a day, very similar to the Indian set up it depends on how they feel at that moment!!

Last year we were taken aside to a room when on a back to back with Celebrity--no explanation as to why and had to sit until someone deemed to talk to us,we were then allowed out of the terminal, We have travelled via Singapore on many occasions and never been stopped previously.

 

Once did a transpacific and we queued onboard to do US Immigration got to the front of the line and the guy left the desk saying nothing. Stood for a few minutes and another agent said could he help as our guy had gone to lunch.

These things are all part of travel and I suppose we have to get used to it if not already.

Liz

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So true, Liz!

 

Moving on to the subject of the 100 bonus points for updating your details prior to sailing, I checked our balance a couple of days ago and noticed that they hadn't been added to our accounts (same happened after last December's cruise) so, again, I emailed Roxanne to request that they be added at the mscclubuk@msccruises.co.uk address. The interesting thing is that I got a reply from her at "statusmatch@msccruises.co.uk"!

 

Another 'interesting' thing is that I never received an email with the link to the comment form - that's a first for me. I'm wondering if this was a deliberate omission on the part of MSC, perhaps due to them not wanting feedback on this cruise. :confused:

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Hi Bea. It seems like the cruise was very much a mixed bag for you and your husband. I'm really surprised at the Singapore carry on as I had always believed them to be ultra efficient and tourist friendly. Thanks for the detailed report , it was very interesting. Ken

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Thanks, Ken. :) You're dead right - a mixed bag. Many highlights with some down sides, too. However, I was a bit sad to be leaving the ship, which is a good indication that I enjoyed the trip (unlike our December experience when I felt I never wanted to set foot onboard another MSC ship again!)

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Yes, Darcy. There were 2 excursions offered:

 

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We chose the first. We left our luggage out the night before, collected it in the terminal the next morning and loaded it onto the excursion bus.

 

For some reason, MSC overlooked issuing customs declaration forms for us to fill in, which caused a bit of a problem at passport control. However, the Japanese officials were wonderful in handling the situation. They had a desk set up where we could fill out the forms and then we were allowed to go directly back to the original official who we had dealt with and get processed, without having to rejoin the queue (which was growing quite quickly as people disembarked the ship. We were one of the earliest off as we had priority disembarkation).

 

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Hi Bea. It seems like the cruise was very much a mixed bag for you and your husband. I'm really surprised at the Singapore carry on as I had always believed them to be ultra efficient and tourist friendly. Thanks for the detailed report , it was very interesting. Ken

 

Same, as an old Asia hand, I found it most interesting. Thanks for the post Bea, it’s all good information.

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Same, as an old Asia hand, I found it most interesting. Thanks for the post Bea, it’s all good information.

 

Thank you! I was very surprised, myself, as we've never had any issues in Singapore before (though I'd never visited from a ship, either - it was either a land-based holiday or, on one occasion, embarking for a round-trip cruise of Asia). The strange thing was that we were finger-printed on return to the ship but not when we were debarking. :confused:

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Hello Bea,

Me and my wife were on same cruise, but we disembarked at Singapore. I guess we left ship at right time and place since everything went well for us.

I must say that most of time weather was a little too hot and moist for us, but we are from Finland :)

 

Jarmo

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Face to face immigration for Japan took place on the ship from the time we left Shanghai, which was terrific. We were given a time of 5pm to attend (it was held in the aft lounge). However, we were passing the lounge after lunch and noticed that the queue wasn't very long, so we asked if we could be processed then. We were told "Yes" so we went to retrieve our passports from the cabin and went back, where we waited for about 20 minutes before being done. We discovered later that the time we were allocated applied to all YC guests. We had the Top Sail lounge to ourselves while they all headed off to get processed. :D

 

Darcy ... if your itinerary overnights in Yokohama, have you considered disembarking on the day of arrival into the port? That way, you would have access to your cabin all day and just head straight to the airport that evening, if you're on a late flight. A few on our cruise opted to do just that.

 

For the excursion, we had to be in the Concierge at 8am but it took a while before we were finally escorted off the ship and onto the bus. We then had to wait for others to clear customs before we eventually headed off at 9.50am.

 

There were only 2 sites included - Tokyo Tower and the Buddhist Senso-ji Temple. It was decided that we would visit the tower first. We were then advised that there wouldn't be time to visit the temple as some people had an early afternoon flight from Narita airport and we had left the port too late to facilitate see both sites and getting to the airport in time. Well, you can imagine the reaction to this news!

 

The tour guide gave us extra time at the tower (which really wasn't needed as it's basically only a viewing platform with a couple of souvenir shops within the building) so we all congregated outside for some time before we were due to leave. There was a lot of discussion amongst everyone about the situation and we were told that people had decided to refuse to return to the bus until the matter was resolved. It transpired that there was only one couple who had an early flight - everyone else had late evening/night-time flights and were in no hurry to get to the airport. It was suggested that a taxi be arranged for the couple (most people wanted them off the bus, no matter what!) and that we continue on with the planned visit to the temple. (As many people said, we had no way of claiming compensation for this turn of events and also, it was questioned as to why this couple had been allowed to book the excursion in the first place, as we'd had to give our flight times at the time of booking). This didn't happen.

 

Now, it turns out that the plan had been to drop those of us who had flights from Haneda off first, as it was nearer the city and then drive on to Narita airport. The tour guide suggested that he could fit in a tour of the city as an alternative to visiting the temple, then head to Narita airport first to facilitate the couple with the early flight, then drive all the way back to Haneda for the remainder of the passengers. This suited us very well, indeed as it meant we were arriving at our airport even later than we had expected to. In fairness, everyone agreed to the change of plan. I suppose there was no alternative, anyway. Fortunately, we had a toilet stop on the way to the first airport where there a couple of places to buy some much-needed food. It was about 2.30pm at this stage and we hadn't had anything since breakfast at 7am that morning - possibly even earlier for others.

 

Seats at the front on all the excursion buses we were on had been reserved for YC guests and this excursion was no exception. As it happened, we were first onto the bus and took the front seats on the opposite side of the driver. There was a 'reserved' sign on the seats behind the driver, but the tour guide had his belongings on one of the seats, so it appeared that he was going to sit there. Anyway, this Swiss couple (who had been in YC) got onto the bus and found there were no other seats reserved. Well ... himself hit the roof and stormed off the bus, demanding to know where his reserved seat was. No-one paid much notice to him. Now, remember, there were hundreds and hundreds of people milling about at this stage, queuing for buses and taxis with luggage and crew all over the place. Well, he got back on and fussed again about there being no 'reserved' seat. I think his wife had already seated herself further back at this stage. Soon after, he was off again to go complain to anyone who would listen.

 

He eventually got back onto the bus and sat down. In the meantime, it transpired that the luggage compartment wouldn't accommodate all the luggage so the seating immediately behind the driver became a luggage compartment! I imagined Mr Swiss blowing a gasket at the sight of this! It turned out that there was a jump-seat across the steps down from the front seats, which the tour guide used, so the Swiss couple could very well have taken the seats behind the driver. Later, we found out that it was himself and the wife who had the early flight! :eek:

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