My wife and I took a nineteen-day repositioning cruise from Miami to Brazil on the Divina. We had mixed views about the cruise. Overall, though, we thought MSC was not up to the standards of the other mainstream cruise lines, and we will not cruise with MSC again.

Warning: This is a long, detailed review. If you make it to the end, you deserve an award! But before I discuss the ship and the actual cruise, full disclosure requires that I mention four things that, from the very beginning, really colored our overall view of this MSC cruise.

First, MSC unilaterally changed the dates of our trip well after we booked it. This was crazy, of course. Everyone who had pre-booked like us had to change our travel plans on both ends. On top of that, MSC did not inform passengers with existing bookings right away -- instead, we found out about the change in dates through chatter on the web and a visit to the MSC website. Then, when I called MSC, it took a long time to get through to an actual person. So, basically, their precruise actions and communication were terrible. Read more