cger61

It all boils down to this. "Let the buyer beware"! The cruise industry is rife with snake oil salesmen. Never, ever, be surprised by any of their tricks used to part the uninitiated from their hard-earned cash. Most of their employees got their training and credentials in the "Arizona Lakefront Realty" business! No disparagement intended to Arizona or the real estate industry!

Well folks, we're all teetering on the the brink of the dreaded fuel surcharge. Oil just hit $63.00 a barrel and Norwegian is salivating at the thought of getting a $40,000 a day increase in their coffers when it hits $65.00. The math is easy. If every passenger coughs up $10 a day, and the ship holds 4,000 passengers, Norwegian's ship comes in! The cruise lines can get away with whatever their little hearts desire because, they are not bound by U.S. consumer protection laws. Most cruisers can afford this annoyance, but pity the newlywed couple on a limited budget who planned for x and gets slapped with y when it comes time to settle their shipboard account. So much for this rant.

MSC Yacht Club was originally touted as an exclusive "Ship Within a Ship", with access to this exclusive area of the ship, and its amenities available to only those cruisers wishing exclusivity and willing to pay for having a butler and other benefits. We did a cruise on the Splendida and enjoyed availing ourselves of this level of service. Well, we recently booked the Yacht Club on the Divina and only through due diligence discovered that the cabin they booked us on as a Yacht Club cabin was not located within the confines of the exclusive area. Cabins within the actual Yacht Club are located on decks 15 & 16. MSC has added 3 cabins located on deck 12 (12001, 12002, & 12004) as Yacht Club cabins. They are in fact 3 decks below the Yacht Club, do not have key controlled access to the area of the ship where these cabins are located, require the people booking these cabins to travel a distance through the hallways to the elevators leading to the actual Yacht Club. The booking agent at MSC failed to reveal these facts at the time of the booking, and when another MSC agent was confronted with the situation was quite snippy and generally exuded an attitude of so what. I am certainly glad that I did the due diligence and didn't arrive at boarding to have been extremely disappointed. Any experienced cruiser knows full well that voicing displeasure on sailing date might get you 4 chocolate covered strawberries.