My party and I didn't know much about cruises, but saw a deal through a Canadian airline and vacation provider, Sunwing, that we thought was cheap enough to try. We paid $1,345 CAD (~$1,000 USD) per person for the flight from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale and a 7-night cruise on the MSC Seaside, which set sail on January 5th, 2019. The deal gave us a balcony cabin with the Fantastica package, along with a bus to and from the port and free checked bags. Our flights were later changed to Miami, which was a bit of a plus.

Before our cruise, we used their website to order an excursion, as well as booking restaurant times. We had some difficulty when booking restaurant times online, as the USA website has a bug that sets the dates and times incorrectly. After some digging, we realised the site required a European timezone and changed our clocks accordingly to get the right times. (We probably could have called to make the same reservations, but our group has some software developers that wanted to figure it out.)

In our research, we found out that MSC has a loyalty program called the MSC Voyagers Club. This program will match your status from other cruise lines or hotels, and we were able to use another loyalty program we had to status match to their highest level, black. Read more