A little about me before the brief review. Family of four, two boys 2 and 4. We have been on about eight 7 days cruises in the past three years (Carnival, Holland America, Princess, and Royal Caribbean). We had two rooms, one an oceanview and the other an interior view.
The check-in process was painful. The ship arrived late, the taxi drive told us that this is common with MSC. We had to wait outside in the heat since the metal detector was at the entrance not the interior of the building. Once past the heat, the embarkation was fair. On the boat, ship is newer, nicely decorated, with very small but deep elevators. The ship is definitely long but not very wide. The room is clean to me but my wife wasn't impressed. One nice thing I would say is that there was lots of closet and space made available for you things compared to the other ships. Now to the main reason why we cruise, the FOOD! The food was at best mediocre. Another person I met on the ship put it more bluntly, "I would return it if I was at the restaurant!" However, they do have some good stuff. Their best has to be the spaghetti and the pizza. However, these things are not available 24/7. In fact, we had to time ourselves constantly for certain type of food. It seems like the food places were open for the ship's personnel's convenience. The only available food 24/7 was the room service with only about 10 items on it. They will NOT deviate even if you offer incentives. They even suggested that I not bother them and go to the buffet! I had to hang-up after telling him the line for that buffet was two miles long! One more thing, the Europeans have this thing for eggplant. I must admit that they prepare it well. However, I could only tolerate three days of consecutive eggplants. Next reason to cruise, service. Here worse in than other cruise line is the language problem. Since more than 30% of their clients are European and 70% of the worker are from Italy, there is definitely a language barrier. This may get better with time but it was frustrating for us.
One big complaint from my wife is the children program or lack of it. There was an attendant there but not much beyond that.