Best Cat Mom

1 hour ago, Beachin2 said:

Not shiny new & glitzy, but the Divina is our favorite YC ship.

We've heard a lot of the crew say that Divina is their favorite as well, even when we were on Seaside. They mentioned that getting to know all the YC passengers was easier in the smaller footprint.

11 hours ago, DaKahuna said:

Interesting about using Deck 7.  Is that the way the Butler takes you or did you learn that one on your own?

Our butler Rodwin taught us that on our first Divina cruise. 🙂

MSC gave me Diamond status (formerly known as Black) for my Marriott Titanium status match. My spouse received Gold for his Hilton Honors Gold status match.

Maybe check the roll call for the cruise before yours or do a mock booking to find out?

The key is when does the ship arrive in port? If there are no unusual events (we've heard of boating accidents in the waters around the port,  TSA and/or US Customs issues, etc.), you probably can board within two or three hours of the dock time. If you don't mind the potential of sitting in the YC port lounge, go as early as you want and enjoy! 🙂

2 hours ago, Itchy&Scratchy said:

the real Italian experience I "enjoyed" on our MSC cruise was real Italians completely ignoring the queue of people at the buffet bar and literally barging in right in front of you to place their order. They spoke Italian, pretended not to understand the unhappy people in line, and, worse yet, yelled out to their companions at the nearby table to see if they also wanted something from the bar.

That is pretty much what you'll get in Italy 

23 minutes ago, Itchy&Scratchy said:

Not sure what cultural differences have to do with lower quality of food and customer service on an MSC cruise.

If you holiday in Italy, you will likely experience the same quality of food and customer service unless you are paying top dollar for your trip. There are vastly different tiers of service for what type of experience you'll have on the ground in Italy.

22 minutes ago, Itchy&Scratchy said:

30 minutes ago, Best Cat Mom said:

An MSC cruise out of Florida is a two-hour flight to Italy for us.

What does this even mean?

That we don't have to fly ~10 hours to enjoy the Italy that we love. We can fly ~2 hours to Florida and board an MSC ship and enjoy the Italian experience. Sorry if that was not clear.

Theoretically, you can check in as early as they let you in the doors of the terminal and when port employees are available at counters. Your boarding will need to wait until it begins in general and then YC is usually one of the first to board. Your signature does not state where you are embarking, which will be part of the time equation.

2 minutes ago, Itchy&Scratchy said:

Many people on our cruise (on FB) said it was going to be their first and last MSC cruise. And not only due to food.

We are not cruisers. We are people who like to travel to Italy. An MSC cruise out of Florida is a two-hour flight to Italy for us. We've spent over 150 nights on land vacations in Italy. If some people decide that MSC is not for them, then they probably will not be spending a few weeks of their holiday time in Italy either. Cultural differences are not always welcome, unfortunately.

2 hours ago, DaKahuna said:

Do you know if you can order off menu items in Le Muse, e.g. something from the MDR, or are you strictly limited to what's on the menu?

I have been offered the MDR gluten-free menu and Le Muse staff would need to fetch it from there for me. We have not yet asked for anything else non-standard, but it does usually depend on the maître d' and/or the chef. Advance notice is always best -- the more notice, the more chance they can fulfill your request.

2 hours ago, DaKahuna said:

Was Le Muse open for lunch on embarkation day?

Well, technically -- yes. But for our embarkation day, the ship did not dock in Barcelona until 1pm. We could not make it to Le Muse by 1:30pm but everyone already on board could dine there. Every cruise we've taken where the ship docks in the morning, we've had lunch in the YC restaurant on embarkation day.

(For Mediterranean cruises, the ship has passengers embarking and disembarking at just about every port. It makes for a less hectic day without complete turnover of everyone at once. We wish that the US cruises could also follow this model, but I doubt that will ever happen.)

2 hours ago, DaKahuna said:

In a later post your mentioned you had a preferred way to get from the YC area forward to Le Muse which is aft on deck 15.  From looking at the deck plans, we had intended to either take deck 15 and use the port side walking track or to drop down to deck 13 and walk the interior, if it was very windy, before going back up to deck 15 to Le Muse.  What is the route that you prefer?

For breakfast, we walk on Deck 15 since that is a direct route from YC to Le Muse. If the weather is bad (raining) or really windy, we might walk through Deck 7 -- which is how we almost always walk for dinner. Deck 7 takes you through bars, the pizza restaurant, the photo "place" (I have no idea what the proper name is). We'll take the elevator just outside of YC to 7, walk all the way to just before the Black and White club/disco (never been in there so not sure of the type of venue) and take either of the two middle elevators back up to 15 (the left-most and right-most elevators only go to 14). Le Muse is to the right just off the elevators.

Once we chose a cabin-only deck to walk, thinking that with the carpets and simple long hallways it would be a good choice instead of 15, especially in my heels. However, all the debris -- room steward carts, used plates from room service, etc. -- made us realize just how nice YC is and we never did that again. 😉

40 minutes ago, DaKahuna said:

Are you able to post pictures easily with just the browse WiFi?

I was able to post the itinerary and dinner menus with no issues just with our browse WiFi. I have been told that we may lose connectivity during the times we are far from land, but I won't know that for a few more days. You'll know if I can't post when everyone starts asking what happened to this thread. LOL

Day 1 Dinner Menu:

Day 1 conclusion…

MSC posts the menus for each day online, allowing scanning of a QR code to view each meal for that day. Subsequent days can be viewed by simply refreshing the page. Unfortunately, we missed grabbing a screen capture of the first night's dinner menu so I'll add images from the YC display stand instead. We'll try to use the online images for the rest of the cruise -- they're so much easier to read without shadows, fingers, etc.

BCD had the Burgundy Snails as a starter for our first night's dinner. When we were on Seaside in September, we saw that Burgundy Snails had been added to the Always Available section of the YC dinner menu. On this cruise, the snails are not listed there so BCD made sure to order them when he saw them. We had really liked having them available every night on Seaside -- I think we ordered them 4 or more times over the 11-nights -- but this may be dependent on cruise location. We'll see if they appear as Always Available on our next Divina cruise, which is in the Caribbean in April. We hope so!

I chose the Steamed octopus carpaccio as my starter. I love the octopus on MSC! I haven't seen the octopus soup yet at lunch which is also one of my favorites, but I'm so looking forward to having it again. Sadly, we don't stop at Ocean Cay this sailing, so I won't be able to enjoy the octopus salad. Perhaps some version of it will show up in Le Muse? Fingers crossed!

We had champagne while perusing the menus and then Sauvignon Blanc with our starters.

For our entrees, we both ordered the Angus beef fillet Oscar-style. I have a severe gluten allergy (not fully celiac, but I am extremely bothered by gluten) so my Oscar-style was crab meat on the side and no hollandaise sauce. The beef was cooked perfectly and we both ate too much of our entrees. 🙂

We enjoyed a chianti with our entrees and continued with it over desert. BCD had the Crêpe Suzette and I indulged in some coffee ice cream with a shot of Kahlua on top. The crepes are a special presentation prepared by the maître d' in the restaurant dining room. We don't normally order deserts as we tend to prefer nuts and cheese after dinner if anything. But being our first night on the ship and having had only pizza for lunch, we indulged.

Overall, we had a great first dinner. We never felt rushed, and were among the last to leave the restaurant at nearly 10pm.

We headed back to the TS lounge for some after dinner drinks and live music. Unfortunately, the piano and saxophone duo that we'd enjoyed from before dinner had already departed. This was the first time we've had a saxophonist in the TS lounge. I hope that they repeat in our lounge a few more times this cruise.

Day 2 next…

Continuing our Day 1...

We returned to our cabin and by 3:45pm, 3 of our 4 bags had been delivered to our cabin. We had already ordered an MSC pizza by room service, anticipating that we'd need some sustenance to help with the unloading. We grabbed two glasses of chianti from the Top Sail Lounge and unpacked. The last bag still had not arrived when we finished so we went to the TS Lounge for drinks.

Around 7ish, I went back to the cabin to change for dinner. Still no sign of our fourth bag. Given that bag had all of our toiletries, I was starting to get quite worried. MSC doesn't usually have a big selection of that type of everyday items on board so if the bag was truly lost, we might be waiting over a week to get to Puerto Rico which is the most likely place we could do a like-for-like replacement of items. In addition, this was the only bag that did not have an Apple Air Tag on it so we could not determine its location. We still hadn't sailed away but knowing it was somewhere on the ship and not still in the terminal (or in the ocean!) would have given us some peace. Waiting for the bag but knowing it was coming is a big difference from having no idea if we'd ever see that bag again.

While I was getting ready for dinner, I had a thought: maybe something in our toiletries was flagged by security? That would be a plausible explanation for the delay and would mean that our stuff was not lost. I decided that was the likely reason and as Best Cat Dad came back to the room, I shared that thought with him when he was barely in the door. And the YC Head Butler was just outside our room at that same moment and told us that indeed our bag was in Security. He walked BCD down to Security to retrieve the bag. Pepe, our YC Director, happened to be in the Security room at that time as well. He proceeded to give a stern lecture to the staff there, stressing that YC passengers should never have to wait so long to be notified of questions with their bags.

Bag was retrieved by BCD and they both returned to our cabin. (A Leatherman tool was the issue and BCD will get it back at the end of our cruise.) We proceeded to dinner at Le Muse, which is at the back (aft) of the ship on Divina and other Fantasia-class MSC ships. We've been on Divina for two previous sailings so we knew exactly how we wanted to walk to Le Muse. I recommend that others in YC for the first time on Divina have a butler escort them on the first night so they don't get lost in the maze of a new ship.

More to come…

7 minutes ago, Mark_T said:

I know he will take great care of you, once he is over his jet-lag

He already is! We were amazed at how great he was on no sleep. Can't wait to find out how he is at full speed. 😉

On 11/29/2023 at 2:50 PM, DaKahuna said:

I am use to StarLink Internet on Celebrity so your experience with Internet on Divina is of interest.

We have free WiFi in YC, but it is only at the "browse" level. So far it has met our expectations from past cruises and needs on this one.

22 hours ago, Mark_T said:

Do you know how full the ship and YC are for this cruise?

...

If the Butler Elvin & his assistant Ari are still on board I hope you will be fortunate enough to have them assigned to you.

Elvin is indeed our Butler. He just boarded with us in Barcelona to start a new contract after a few months at home. He is still getting over the jetlag and told us that he barely slept last night -- but he was still very attentive. 🙂 Our Junior Butler is Jewell, though I'm not sure if Elvin and Jewell are paired for all of Elvin's cabins.

Elvin told us that the whole ship is only at about 50-60% capacity right now. We have a few stops before the crossing but he didn't think that they'd be many more people embarking.

If the ship docks at noon or later, maybe not. Our ship arrived in Barcelona at 1pm and the first YC group boarded around 2:30pm. Le Muse was already finished with lunch so we ordered a room service pizza while we unpacked. 🙂

1 hour ago, Mark_T said:

Do you know how full the ship and YC are for this cruise?

We've heard from the Maître d' of Le Muse that YC only has 78 guests for this sailing, which is nearly half of full capacity. (Divina has 69 staterooms; at double capacity that is 138 guests.)

Divina YC Director currently is Giuseppe Terminiello, commonly known as Pepe. He was on Seaside in 2018 as Maitre d' of the YC Restaurant. I also think he was an MDR restaurant manager more recently.

We boarded yesterday in Barcelona. The ship was due into port at 1pm so we decided to arrive at noon in case the ship was early. This was our first time using the Port of Barcelona so we were not sure what to expect. There were no signs indicating which ship was in which terminal (no electronic board like in Miami), but we quickly found that Divina would be using Terminal A (at least for this time, not sure if MSC always uses A in Barcelona).

There was not a marked area for YC at the bag check. There were only a few passengers there and 4 desks to check in just outside the terminal entrance doors. I asked about YC check in and they indicated that we could check in at any of the desks. They checked our embarkation forms, collected our health questionnaires, gave us a Priority card (presumably to indicate YC)  and our bags were tagged with YC labels. We proceeded inside directly to the security screening. I think I recall 4 security lines, only one of which was open. There was no line and we passed through quickly. Our 2 bottles of water and bags of snacks were not confiscated. We saw a dozen or so people seated in the terminal. After we showed the Priority card, we were brought to another area near the baggage claim where about 15 people where already seated.

We watched the ship maneuver into the port and dock at nearly exactly 1pm. We saw our priority area gain more people, close to about 50. At just before 2pm, someone came over to gather the YC passengers to take us to the "VIP area." We expected all of the folks seated with us to be YC, but there were only 10 of us that were moving. I guess the others were Aurea or Diamond? I believe that those passengers also receive some type of priority boarding, though I'm not sure because we've only traveled in YC on MSC.

The VIP area held a total of ~25 comfortably. Within 15 minutes, we were checked in and by 2:35pm the other 6 people were completely checked in with photos taken, cruise cards issued and newspaper selections confirmed. The other 2 people were "ejected" from the lounge. We heard them say that their cabin was 9010. I had thought that perhaps they had one of the duplex suites that are considered YC even though they were out of the YC enclave. Apparently not. Perhaps there was a language barrier and they thought that Voyagers Club was being called instead of Yacht Club?

Our cruise cards did not have our Voyager Club status listed. They stated that they did not have access to that info in the port, but our cards could be updated once onboard. They told this to everyone as it seemed that all of us had some type of upper VC status that was not displayed.

We were onboard and in the Top Sail Lounge by 2:45pm. Pepe, the YC Director, was making his rounds to greet each couple of our YC boarding group. We thought we recognized him and later confirmed this. Pepe, whose full name is Guiseppe Terminiello, was the YC maitre d' on our very first MSC cruise which was on Seaside back in 2018. It was wonderful to be greeted by someone who remembered us. 🙂

Then on our way out of Top Sail to our cabin, we saw that the YC bartender was Hubert, who was the One Deck bartender on our October 2022 Divina sailing. He greeted us with a big smile and we again felt the hospitality of YC. Seeing those familiar faces is always a great thing. 🙂

More to come…

We are currently on the Divina in a Yacht Club Deluxe Suite (YC1) on Deck 15 on the Port side (which is the odd room numbers). We departed from Barcelona yesterday, Tuesday, 28 November, for a 16-night transatlantic crossing. Here is our itinerary:

I will try to share our experiences on this cruise on a day-to-day basis, though the internet is expected to be challenging during some days of the crossing. Feel free to ask any questions, and I'll do my best to answer.