We choose this cruise because of the ports and the ability to conveniently fly in and out of Amsterdam. It was a seven day cruise with stops in five portsThe ship itself is lovely. Meal portions in the dining room were perfect and the service wonderful. We looked forward to embarking at our scheduled time of 2pm and having lunch. Apparently weather issues would not allow for the ship to safely enter the port in Amsterdam, so everyone was bused to Zeebrugge; a four hour ride, no food or water, bathrooms that shut down after 50 uses and a trip through the police station in Zeebrugge to present our passports. We finally got dinner at 8pm and our bags at 10:30 pm. Ok, so a rough start. Our first stop was Hamburg, where we waited well over 75 minutes for a shuttle what was supposed to come every 30 minutes.

II had not known better I would have thought this was the very first cruise for this ship and it's crew. There were people embarking and disembarking at every port. This created absolute chaos for getting on and off the ship. We were late getting into four out of five ports, which meant that some of our excursions were cut by up to an hour or more. Our Itinerary also changed twice during the cruise. There seemed to be a lot of excuses for what was happening and a tremendous lack of communication to crew members who were bearing the brunt of passengers anger and frustration. Maybe this was just a situation of "anything that could go wrong did," but I will sail with MSC again.