Live from Armonia - 20 October to 27 October 2023 - Ancona to Ancona

[lisiamc]

Hi - I thought I’d do a “Live from…” thread for Armonia, MSC’s oldest, and joint smallest ship (with Sinfonia.) Some background:

 

We (DH, 73 and me, 67) are avid cruisers, but this will be our first MSC cruise. We are sailing with six friends. Four of them are also experienced cruisers (although they are also MSC virgins) but for one couple, this will be their very first cruise on any line. I’m so excited for them! The first cruise is always special, I think.
 

My first cruise was in 1992, on a Princess ship, with my mother, and I still remember it very fondly. The newbies are Italian, about five or six years younger than the rest of us, living a little bit inland from Ancona. The rest of us are British ex-pats, from the same area. We have arranged parking at Ancona port, although that was a bit of a challenge. The website was set up to charge per person rather than per car. In the end, we did it by email with the actual parking facility, and that worked well.

 

I’m looking forward to getting on board tomorrow, and exploring a ship that is new to us. DH and I have previously cruised with Azamara, Princess, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Costa, Silversea, Seabourn, Viking, and Cruise & Maritime Voyages, so a reasonable selection. Our ports on this cruise are Ancona and Venice in Italy, Kotor in Montenegro, Mykonos and Santorini in Greece. It’s also being marketed as a round-trip from and to Venice, since MSC does interporting.

 

I’ve read/watched every review of Armonia that I could find, and I’m interested to see how what I’ve learned compares to what we will experience. 
 

I hope you enjoy seeing a familiar ship through new eyes. 

 

 

 

 

[maehara]

We’re doing that itinerary on Lirica (Armonia-class ship) in 2025, albeit embarking / disembarking at Venice. Will be following your trip as a taster. 😁

[lisiamc]

1 hour ago, maehara said:

We’re doing that itinerary on Lirica (Armonia-class ship) in 2025, albeit embarking / disembarking at Venice. Will be following your trip as a taster. 😁

Let me know if there’s anything I can check out for you. 

[lisiamc]

We left the house a little before noon to go to Ancona. We arrived at just about the time they were switching over from disembarking passengers to embarking new ones. Perfect timing. Parking the car was somewhat complicated, since we had to check in, drop the bags, get a car parking reference number, move the car to the appropriate area, and then had in the key. It was much easier to accomplish in the end than it sounds like it would be. Checking in was easy and quick.  We had realised a few days ago that the four bookings in our group were not connected, so our first task was to fix that. We were able to get a dinner table for eight, although it was a temporary table, and tomorrow night we will have a different, more permanent table. We wish we could keep the initial waitstaff team, as they were very good. I’m sure the team for the permanent table will also be very good.
 

This is my bag beside the car, proof that I was ready before the appointed hour! 

Edited October 20, 2023 by lisiamc

[lisiamc]

 Venice (Marghera) is our first port of call, and the weather is much better than the forecast promised a few days ago. Although most of our port calls are a decent length, today is somewhat short. We arrived at 7am, and we will depart at 2pm. MSC have laid on a free shuttle boat into Venice. Four of our friends went into the city, and the other four of us have stayed on board. Our sightseeing friends were still in the queue for the shuttle at 8.45, and the last boat will leave Venice at 1pm or 1.30. That makes for quite a short time for sightseeing, and since we’ve seen a lot of Venice over the years, we elected to stay on board. Today is another embarkation/disembarkation day. Lots of passengers have disembarked, and I’m sure loads more will embark in their places.

 

Scenic Marghera!

[Beamafar]

Hope your cruise is as enjoyable as ours has been this week, L.  Look forward to reading how it’s going.   

[Beamafar]

I don’t know if this will be of any interest to you, or if there will be anything relevant to your cruise, but here’s a link to a review I did on Armonia on a Caribbean sailing

 

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/2631573-notes-from-armonia-miami-havana-jan-2019/

[lisiamc]

Our cabin steward exists, apparently, but we have not seen him, and he isn’t doing a very good job. I noticed that the bathroom floor was dirty last night, and today, the same crud is still there. A small pile of someone else’s hair is behind the door. Last night there was also a hair pin on the floor on the other side, but I put it in the bin, where it remains, since the bin has not been emptied. It’s getting quite full now. On the bright side, we did get two bath towels. I am of two minds about whether to say anything until nearer the end of the cruise, in case I feel I have to hide my toothbrush for the rest of the week.

 

 

[lisiamc]

For most of the cruise, I had severe trouble with the internet. It would only stay connected for a few minutes at a time, and I lost the momentum of trying to post on a daily basis. 
 

Our second port was Kotor. Again, we had great weather, and we elected to just walk around the town for a little while. We waited for about an hour and a half after docking to try to get off. We thought we’d let the excursions and the people in a hurry get a head start. By the time we joined the queue, we still had to wait an hour and a half to get off. We got on shore at about 16.15. We were not going to be on shore long enough to eat at a restaurant in town, and we had early assigned dining, at 18.45. By now there was also a long queue of returning people. So our visit to Kotor was disappointingly short. I am surprised that getting everyone off was such a disaster. 
 

By the third day, I realised that our steward was just hanging our used towels and bathmat back up, even though we had put them in the bath or on the floor to be replaced. (I figured this out when I drew a little X on the towel and bathmat labels.) I had to run them under the tap to get them pretty wet before he’d change them. We had met him, and he was nice, but seemed pretty overwhelmed. I just tried to make it as easy as possible for him to do the right things, and we decided not to mention any of this to a more senior housekeeper.

[Captain-John]

You were very forgiving on the room steward, I cannot say I would be the same if he picked my used towel up from a floor that was not spotless to begin with and hung it back up.

 

Hoping that aside you had a good time, but for your first MSC cruise, it certainly could have gone smoother (internet, port experiences/queuing) etc. Did you enjoy the food?

[lisiamc]

4 hours ago, Captain-John said:

You were very forgiving on the room steward, I cannot say I would be the same if he picked my used towel up from a floor that was not spotless to begin with and hung it back up.

 

Hoping that aside you had a good time, but for your first MSC cruise, it certainly could have gone smoother (internet, port experiences/queuing) etc. Did you enjoy the food?

You’ll be pleased to know that we thought the food was generally very good, and frequently excellent. We eat low carb, and there was at least one very suitable item on the menu every night. The cheese plate was great - the selection varied every night, there was not too much, and it was served at exactly the right temperature. The wines were lovely, as they should be on an Italian ship sailing from an Italian port. Brewed coffee was served at breakfast in the dining room, but not at lunch or dinner.  The coffee in the Bar del Duomo was very good, slightly better than in the San Marco Cafe, although somewhat expensive. One of our friends was paying €4 every morning for a cappuccino. I’m not sure what they charged for our espressos, since we had the drinks package.

 

We found that the waiters tended to be a bit formal at first, but thawed pretty quickly when they discovered we were friendly. They were good at remembering who liked what on our table of eight, and did their best to provide great service every evening.

 

We were delighted to discover that the Main Dining Room was open for lunch every day, even on port days. It was an oasis of calm from the total zoo at the buffet.

[rnr4thatsme]

Enjoying the review!  A little grossed out by the hair on the floor!   Hope that's the exception, not the rule!

[lisiamc]

5 minutes ago, rnr4thatsme said:

Enjoying the review!  A little grossed out by the hair on the floor!   Hope that's the exception, not the rule!

We were very unhappy about the hair on the floor! The steward was a really nice person, and very overwhelmed by his job. We did not speak to the Head of Housekeeping, and instead just tried to make it easy for him to do a good job. 
 

We had eight friends in total on this cruise, and the ones in the other three cabins did not report any problems with housekeeping. Service for everything else, like coffees, cocktails, meals, etc. was good to very good.
 

Many of the servers we chatted to had worked for other cruise lines, and said that MSC was a good company to work for, and they liked it better than their previous companies. They might have been spouting the company line, but they seemed happy with their jobs. 

 

One thing that really impressed me was that no one pressured us to give them a good evaluation on the post-cruise surgery. In fact, no one even mentioned a post-cruise survey at all. When it arrived in the email, we were very happy to name and praise the people who had looked after us so well. 
 

At busy places like the Pool Bar at lunchtime, they were using the traditional Italian method of queueing up to pay, then taking the slip to the bartender to pick up the drink. It may lack a certain panache, but it’s efficient for serving a lot of people very quickly.

[rnr4thatsme]

22 hours ago, lisiamc said:

We were very unhappy about the hair on the floor! The steward was a really nice person, and very overwhelmed by his job. We did not speak to the Head of Housekeeping, and instead just tried to make it easy for him to do a good job. 
 

We had eight friends in total on this cruise, and the ones in the other three cabins did not report any problems with housekeeping. Service for everything else, like coffees, cocktails, meals, etc. was good to very good.
 

Many of the servers we chatted to had worked for other cruise lines, and said that MSC was a good company to work for, and they liked it better than their previous companies. They might have been spouting the company line, but they seemed happy with their jobs. 

 

One thing that really impressed me was that no one pressured us to give them a good evaluation on the post-cruise surgery. In fact, no one even mentioned a post-cruise survey at all. When it arrived in the email, we were very happy to name and praise the people who had looked after us so well. 
 

At busy places like the Pool Bar at lunchtime, they were using the traditional Italian method of queueing up to pay, then taking the slip to the bartender to pick up the drink. It may lack a certain panache, but it’s efficient for serving a lot of people very quickly.

How did that work if people had the Easy Plus package since they weren't paying for individual drinks?

[lisiamc]

5 minutes ago, rnr4thatsme said:

How did that work if people had the Easy Plus package since they weren't paying for individual drinks?

When I was in the queue, I could see the people ahead of me handing over their card to the person at the till, who swiped it and handed back one or two pieces of paper. For the people who were paying for a beer or whatever, they got handed two slips, one to give to the bartender, and one as a receipt for the charge to their account. I had the good drinks package, and I just got the one slip to give to the bartender. I’m not sure where the Easy Plus package would fall in that spectrum. I guess if they got a bottle of water, they’d just get the slip to hand over, and if they had something not included, they’d get a receipt for the charge?