peder

I know it's an Orlando / Port Canaveral departure, so there isn't quite as much time available for each cruise port, but those are very short windows at each port. I'll need to comb thru the Divina schedule to see if there are any interesting itins, otherwise I'm probably skipping MSC for that Caribbean season.

Good point on the timing of the reviews. MSC went full capacity on their ships along with dropping vaccine requirements / COVID testing pretty quickly, so that meant (1) they probably attracted cruisers from other lines that were maybe never MSC's target customer, and (2) they might not have been completely staffed up yet, or at least much of their staff was new to MSC or even new to cruising entirely. Just not a good idea to rely on ~2022 reviews.

No, it's not really that bad. Same way that the NCL Prima and Viva are not that bad (though I do not understand why the Prima/Viva wasted so much space on the race track). The Seaside-class ships are quite different than the typical cruise ship, maximizing outdoor space for warm climates. Most of the complaints are that the ship feels crowded, but I found that there were always plenty of loungers free, even when the ship was sailing full, it was just a matter of moving around to find them.

Also note that many Americans' first experience with MSC was with the Seascape. Many of the reviews of the Seascape are very Amero-centric and expect MSC to be exactly like Carnival/Royal/etc.

5 hours ago, Stockjock said:

Tomorrow is a whole new day.

"It's always darkest right before it goes completely black," - MSC IT, probably

I'm back in business! Maybe my hundred or so 502s made no difference, but I like to think I sent a message directly to someone on their monitoring team

Clearly I need to hammer the refresh button on my browser so their monitoring teams finally see the wave of 502 errors.

I get the same 502 regardless of whether I use incognito, so cookies aren't the issue. Based on the details of my error message, it appears MSC has migrated some of their Azure infrastructure, and MSC either needs to clear a cache of its own or it never updated user information to point to the new Azure endpoints or the endpoints are down.

It should be incredibly rare for users to not be able to log in to your site, and when it happens, issues related to it should be considered a top priority. Sev 0 / Sev 1, drop-everything-until-it-is-resolved type of issue.

The above was from my Account Settings page.

When I inspect the response from my "Plan My Cruise" page, I see the following:

Error in GetBookingAddedCXLFilter.GetBookingAdded microservice endpoint call failed with an error: The remote server returned an error: (400)Bad Request.

lol MSC

{
    "status": {
        "category": "InternalServerError",
        "message": "One or more errors occurred. (No such host is known. (fn-b2c-prod-northch-sessiondata.azurewebsites.net:443))",
        "success": false,
        "statusCode": 500
    }
}

Did you do a server migration and you didn't migrate corresponding user data?

Ah drat. I'm now getting this error, shortly before departure on my next cruise. I'm planning on leaving it alone until after the cruise because I think that's less risky.

Well of course the Yacht Club posters would have access to both the Aurea and gen pop boards 😉

There are definitely discounts from time to time, but I don't think there's generally a correlation between a "sale" and discounting with MSC or any cruise lines. In my experience, a holiday "sale" tends to be mostly marketing rubbish. But some of the "flash deals" are true discounts that are specific to poorly-selling itineraries. There are also sometimes heavily discounted itineraries that are published without much fanfare (I believe there were some recent 7-night Seascape sailings with YC deluxe cabins going for only $3k with dual occupancy, and I don't think those price cuts were announced anywhere, they were simply a reflection of poor sales related to Ocean Cay being dropped from the itinerary).

"Bringing a second ship to Port Canaveral will give MSC Cruises’ guests a much wider selection of cruises. MSC Grandiosa will offer alternating 7-night Eastern and Western Caribbean itineraries. Meanwhile, MSC Seashore will sail 3- and 4-night cruises to Nassau and Ocean Cay MSC Marine Reserve, the line’s private island in The Bahamas."

This is the only disappointing aspect IMO. Presumably will be the same handful of ports that we already see on 7-day Orlando and Miami itineraries. It would be great if MSC had the occasional 8- or 10-night sailing from Orlando or Miami on their newer vessel that went somewhere fresh.

And ya know, I'd argue that the Explora 1 is the largest YC.

Itineraries not yet listed on the MSC US website, but will probably be posted within a week or two? MSC is presumably getting close to locking in their fleet deployments for all their ships for December 2025 and onward.

12 hours ago, Stockjock said:

I didn't see that post, could you provide a link?

And just today, we have schedule announcements for the Grandiosa! 

3 minutes ago, sverigecruiser said:

 

There are two large whirlpool on the Top 20 deck just outside the YC on deck 20.

 

I think that the made-to-order food was very nice so no step back, I think.

oh, good to know. Almost everyone has labeled the food situation as more of a hassle and/or taking things away. Yours is the first report I've seen saying it's at least largely equivalent.

But RE: whirlpools: the Top 20 deck whirlpools are of course shared with Aurea, no?

The service aspects are irrelevant to us, and the wait times for dinner seem to have been at least partially solved by opening a second dining space for YC guests in the 2nd floor of the buffet.

However, the small pool, only having one whirlpool? Moving away from small plate snacks + buffet to a made-to-order grill? That's a big step back from the Seashore/Seascape YC experience.

The Owners Suites look great, tho, so I'm still tempted to book on World America or World Europa. And the rest of the ship, especially the outdoor promenade look great. It seems like the World-class ships have the best Bella/Fantastica experience of any class in the fleet?

1 minute ago, Stockjock said:

I didn't see that post, could you provide a link?

Oh, just the one about website issues. The MSC website was down for an extended maintenance period, and I'm speculating that they're about to announce schedule changes.

They were probably first adding assets to support the new itineraries (maybe cruise thumbnail photos?) then they'll enable the schedule after they've done some internal prod testing and/or readied press releases or other communications to announce the release of 2026 itins.

Thanks for this info. There's a whole language of technical issues like this that are helpful to understand how MSC operates.

As I mentioned in another thread, there are likely a ton of schedule updates about to be posted, mostly for 2026 but apparently you also some 2025 updates like your sailing.

Yeah, I read the post. But it's just a press release and has no new info whatsoever.

Sounds identical to World Europa

I'm guessing they're readying the site for 2026 itineraries? Maybe will correspond with a Memorial Day sale?

At 873' long are they going to start running into issues getting into some ports?

Also, if the ship is 60' longer, how would that not increase passenger count, becaues surely means more cabins? Unless they're going to greatly increase the number of penthouses?