|
We are retired professionals from Australia - husband and wife aged 63 and 59. We holiday often in Europe and the Pacific. This was our second cruise.
We embarked in Venice on 15 October 2009. The embarkation was chaotic and we hadto stand in long queues to await security processing. Once on board our cabins were shown to us promptly and our luggage arrived several hours later.
The cabin was of a reasonable size with a functional bathroom and a great balcony. Linen, towels, etc were of highquality and the wardrobe space was quite large. The TV was a waste of time as apart from BORING CNN, there were only two other English language channels CNBC and BBC World. What about SKYMrMSC??
The food was absolutely fantastic. We ate on the late sitting and were only hurried once. The variety of food was just remarkable and the Itlian regional selections of food were excellent. We heardsome Australians rubbishing the food but can't understand why as this food was really good.
Staff were all friendly with the exception of the Accounting Desk team who were singularly glum. reception staff were good until our phone broke down and it took us 6 visits over 30 hours to get it fixed.
The recreational areas were good and we gave the small, but adequate gym a goood work out. It could do with an instructor as the equipment was a little different to our local gym in Mordialloc and the instructions were in Italian.
The ports of call were interesting and the MSC promotedtours we did were good, except for Kotor where we had to share a joint English language/German language tour and the narratives took far too long. We and a few othersabondonned the tour after about 90 minutes (no reflection on the tour guide - but having two languiages at that very highprice was unfair). The tours were quite dear and for our next MSC cruisein March on Splendida we will do ourown thing, or engage the services of a tour guide at the port - each port hadplenty of them touting for business and feed back from fellow passengers was good re these guides and places visited.
The theatre entertainment was awful by our standards - but plenty enjoyed it. Smoking can be a problem, whilstlimited to restricted areas, any area nearby gets the full stink and inconvenience of others' smoke.
Disembarkation was chaotic too and the entire venice disembarkation area is open to allweather. The shuttle bus driver would not assist people load their luggage into the difficult to access bins below the bus. A shuttle to Mestre railway station would be handy.
Summing up - MSC Opera is very good and we thoroughly enjoyed our cruise.
Hayden and Jill, Melbourne, Australia
|
