We travelled on MSC Fantasia in Sept '10 on their Western Med cruise after completing the eastern side of the med on the Musica. We quite enjoyed the Musica Cruise, although it was fairly crowded and their lack of smoking policy was not to our taste. Fantasisa is a bigger ship; longer; more passenger decks; but roughly the same amount of passenger area. Firslty, let me say, it truly is a fantastic ship and lives up to it's name. We enjoyed the meals and the service was generally good, but we would say to intending travellers of the future, consider these 3 points;

- It is a multi lingual boat, so all announcements are in about 5 languages, so announcements went on forever. Quite often the English speaking part of the announcement was so accented you missed the beginning of it. If English followed Italian, the Italian crowd (by far the largest number) were all up and talking so the announcements were difficult/impossible to understand.This also affected the variety and content of the shows, which were OK, but singing and comedians were out of the question; and the announcer took up about 1/3rd of the show making the opening and closing announcements in 5 languages.

- The deck areas, especially the upper deck with the pools were unreasonably crowded and you had to be lucky to get a deck chair. Read more