First a little about myself. I or anyone else in the family (wife and two children 11 and 13) have never been on a cruise. But, we've traveled to numerous destinations around the world including Europe/UK over half a dozen times, a few times to various regions in Asia, Australia, South Africa, and many different areas in the USA. We are the type of people that will not go on packaged tours as we go about ourselves either by renting a car, taking a train, or using the local transit services (subway/bus) on arrival. If we take a packaged city tour, that's only because someone else that was travelling with us wanted to.

Being first timers on a cruise ship, I wanted a relatively inexpensive cruise in the area around Venice. MSC gave me the most bang-for-the-buck as our two children essentially sailed for free. If I hated the cruise/ship, at least I could say that I didn't spend a good chunk of change. For the past 10 years, I just couldn't stomach going on a cruise because as a family, we don't like to sit/lie on a sunny deck/beach and I never liked the 'constriction' where limited deck space/amenities we may encounter.

Overall, the experience was better than I expected. The ship itself is gorgeous. Check In was relatively painless...relatively, because I didn't know that we needed to drop off our luggage before checking in. Because the wife was in a leg cast, one of the MSC staff immediately came over and gave us tickets for priority boarding before we even checked in. He took us to CSR and check in is as smooth as I've seen flying business class on the major airline carriers. Read more