Never again MSC. We were ill after this cruise

We were ill for several weeks after the cruise. Our stomach problems really stared on the plane after leaving the ship on the last day. We had only eaten on-board while on the cruise. We are convinced that we caught a bug whilst on board. After 3 Visits to the doctors my wife now seems to be a lot better but still has stomach problems. We were contacted by a passenger stayed on the ship for a further week after us. This was her comments:-

There were lots of people on the ship (passengers and crew) with low-grade food poisoning but the medical team and ship were misreporting it so they would not be investigated by the port authorities. Whole tables were having problems -7 out of 8 on our table with just my partner being OK.

The last 2 days they actually started taking action and cleaning handrails, enforcing the hand gel when going into the restaurants and when getting on the ship.

The cruise was bad. The cabin was so narrow that to get into bed we had to bend down and shuffle sideways, it was not comfortable at all.

The passengers on board were mainly Italian. We had been on board only an hour when this middle aged Italian ran into my wife almost knocking her over. If you used the lifts you had to fight your way out as the other passengers would rush into the lifts giving you no chance to get out.

The quality of the food was very poor. The main restaurant was OK if all you wanted was pizza, pasta or burgers. The formal restaurant was slightly better but the portions were poor and the preparation variable. I asked for a medium steak but it arrived raw inside. After sending it back twice I gave up.

The staff were generally polite but I heard reports of someone swearing at a passenger and the waiting staff having a “bun fight” during dinner one night.

When we arrived back in the UK we spoke to friends of ours that had been on a different MSC cruise shortly before and they state that they would never go on another.

We went to see customer services on the last night. The fist girl I spoke to was very polite and friendly. She told me I would have to speak to a manager who was very impolite and so was his manager, all they did was quote company policy and were not interested in sorting our problem out.

The ship was terrible. Passengers were allowed to smoke in the bar area even though there was an enclosed smoking area next to the bar.

On arriving back I tried to contact MSC customer services, only to be told that I could not speak to anyone, they only responded to email. I sent an email, which was returned days later because I had not used the correct customer services address. I had to send it again. Why the person could not have forwarded my email I do not know. I received a reply back to say they would contact me within 28 days. I did not receive an email for over a month.

I truly believe that any company that only deals with emails for customer services and sets a response date of a month, do not really care about customers.

Never again MSC.

Terrible cabin.