We had a “magical” time on our Disney Cruise last week! Let me preface my review by saying I’m a fairly experienced cruiser, I believe this last cruise marked my 15th overall and 5th with Disney. This was my third time sailing on the Magic; the first in 2003 as a child, the second after graduating college in 2014, and again in 2022. It’s definitely not the newest ship on the block but Disney maintains the ship impeccably and the refurb completed several years ago was stunning. They’ve also made some changes since my last sailing including the addition of the Tangled themed restaurant.

This voyage marked my first cruise post-pandemic, and I personally think Disney did an exceptional job with their health and safety protocols. A word of advice here is to be flexible and don’t expect that everything is going to be the same as before. Like or not we are still in the middle of a global pandemic, and despite rigorous vaccination and testing requirements other lines have STILL experienced COVID outbreaks. So yes, this means no sail away party, you’ll experience less live entertainment since everything was broken out into two groups due to social distancing, you can’t get up close and personal with the characters, you may have to wait to get in the pool etc. We personally didn’t find that it hampered my enjoyment of the cruise at all.

Anyway- we found the check-in process to be very smooth and well-organized. We arrived at our designated port arrival time, headed immediately into testing, had our results in 25 minutes and boarded the ship with no wait time. It would be nice if this could all be done through the Disney app but understandable they have to use a third party testing service. You don’t receive your key to the world card at check-in; it’s adhered to your stateroom door which I liked even better. Staterooms were available promptly at 3pm and in excellent condition as always. Read more