Cornishrex1

The waiter told us that the head chef was pretty upset about his budget for the Rio trip. I ended up sticking with pasta / risotto for the whole trip in the standard dining room. There must have been Italian chefs still on board though as they could still cook cheap pasta and risotto to al dente perfection.  The meat was rubbish though and the fish inedible. And no surf and turf like on the USA trip. We’re back on seascape out of Miami in October so looking forward to seeing if the food is as good as before.

Its the price point that keeps drawing us back to MSC though - what you get for what you pay, and you accept the compromises - like ridiculous queues / scrums for bar drinks. Three MSC cruises this year …..

We were on the seascape last year and loved it (beautiful ship and fab food). We have rebooked the seascape for later this year. We sailed out of Miami last year. We are brits. There were ALOT of Italians and French on board last year. And a few confused Americans. All the Americans were outraged by the rudeness of the Italians. We were not. We know the Italians, we’ve been there many times, they have a different perception of rudeness and very different benchmarks. When brits go somewhere they search for the queue. When Italians see a queue they do their best to turn it into a rugby scrum.

We were on the Seaview out of Rio earlier this year - the food was horrendous. The state of the plumbing worse.  The waiting staff told us that they fit the quality / cost per head of the food to the clientele - they feel they could get away with crap food in South American, but not on a sailing out of the USA.

A few days ago I was being offered options for the drinks package on a celebrity millennium cruise from Mumbai in feb 2025. Now, there is no option at all for choosing a drinks package. I can only book a room, and an option to include gratuities. Why would it change like that? I can still book the drinks package if I try to book the same cruise on celebrity’s own website.

Fantastic !!! Thank you so much for replying  - that’s exactly the know how I needed! I’ll book it now ….

Thank you all. Yes it is a real shame that we cannot get deposits back in the U.K. I have seen the talk of refundable deposits in the US. I’ve checked our Ts and C’s - we definitely  cannot. So unless I can book via a US travel agent benefiting from US terms, then we have to gamble. Very difficult to work out prices for this year as so few cruises heading out of Rio for the rest of this year with MSC. Plus this particular cruise kicks off mid way through the Rio carnival, so who knows, that might make it more popular.

Unless anyone else has specific experience of this problem, I guess I will have to close my eyes and jump and hope we don’t lose out on pricing.

Hi, we are in the U.K. We just finished a cruise out of Miami on Seascape. We loved every minute of it (apart from a few shocking examples of a complete lack of organisation). We got a really good deal (booking directly through MSC U.K.) including premium drinks when booking in October ‘22 for that Feb ‘23 cruise - as a package  it was cheaper than even adding on the easy drinks package as a standalone.
 

We want to book our next MSC cruise for Feb 2024, out of Rio de Janeiro. I now have MSC Voyager club membership at silver level. Do I book now and take advantage of the 9-12 month in advance of cruise date discount pricing, or hold off? Are these 9-12 month advance discounts the best we are going to get, or do they drop in your experience? Or it is just anyone’s guess?
 

From what I can read, the view seems to be that prices are likely to go up, not down, due to increasing demand. Is that your experience? There don’t seem to be any drinks packages even available yet, so it will bump the price of the cruise up quite a bit if we lock in to the price now and book the drinks package later (we’d ideally want easy plus). Not in yacht club - looks lovely but we were happy with what we got at that price in our standard family balcony cabIn. And it looks like the deposits are not refundable, so we can’t book now and get the booking changed later if prices drop in 6 months time.

thanks for any thoughts - the seascape booking for feb 2023 was a last minute thought so I don’t have any longer term data on how MSC cruise prices tend to pan out across a year.