I cruised on the MSC Divina for the first time for the Def Leppard cruise. From the beginning, the employees were rude, unhelpful and uninformed. Check in was excessively long and they don't even let you provide your credit card for onboard charges. They send you off on your own to figure this out, which wastes time when trying to start your vacation.

The first mistake by MSC was to allow the promoter to book only half the ship for Def Leppard cruisers. Imagine a bunch of rock n roll fans who expect a rock n roll experience, but they are instead mixed in with families and regular cruisers. The result was the Def Leppard cruisers, who paid a lot more for this cruise than the regular cruisers, were treated like second class citizens. The employees had no information about our specific activities, didn't care to find out and did not want to help when weather interfered with plans to have our bands play on the pool deck. One day it rained and the bands scheduled to play on the pool deck couldn't play there. MSC had no contingency plan and it took them half the day to figure out how to provide the entertainment the Def Leppard cruisers paid for and were expecting. Any other cruise line would've planned for such adversity and implemented Plan B within minutes.

Once they actually had a Plan B, it wasn't communicated to DL cruisers until the last minute because the regular cruisers were more important than those of us who paid more for a special experience. Our bands were also denied places to perform because MSC had other events scheduled in those spaces (one guy playing an acoustic guitar.) They should've reevaluated and planned better. Read more