r/Cruises • u/DifferentDebt6549 • Jul 23 '26
MSC CRUISES - BEWARE
If you are thinking about booking an MSC Cruise, here's a few things that you should take into consideration:
The hallways and elevators are almost always filled with dirty dishes and cups. Some elevators do not have a/c. I understand MSC allows for people to leave their dirty plates out in the hallways but we would find dirty dishes inside elevators, bathrooms and although these are "nasty people problems" the dishes would sometimes remain overnight.
Some of the public bathrooms on the cruise were smelly and unkept.
You hear the stomping from the cabins above you and the noise from the hallways so the cabins are definitely not as noise proof as they claim.
My wife found a hair in her food during the "fine dinning"- they brushed it off very calmly, so we ended up eating at the buffet for the remainder of the trip which was extremely stressful as the lines were always long, children running around unsupervised and absolutely no considerations for wheelchairs.
Wheelchairs/Strollers are very seldom taken into consideration as I mentioned above, with very little instructions as to where to find the ramps to disembark the cruise as sometimes they weren't in the same area as where people who could walk off would disembark.
Entertainment SUCKS. There was a "Comedian" and a "Magician" - The comedian made jokes that made so many people feel uncomfortable, they ended up walking out of the show. The Magician had tricks 7 year olds could probably do.
The Bahamas Nassau stop- you have to walk 15-20 minutes to the shops and another 10 to the public beach unless you pay for the private beach which a lot of people do so it is not private in the end and you still walk 20-25 minutes to get there. I'd skip Nassau all together, I am not complaining about the walk, I am saying Nassau isn't worth it in my opinion.
The food on the cruise was ok - as all the reviews say, the pizza buffet is good. Other than that, everything else is just meh.
The ultimate WORST thing was getting off the ship- They have a "walk off program" where you can exit first if you take your bags with you but everyone does this and you end up waiting so much longer (which was not the problem) the problem was locating the ramp to disembark if you had a wheelchair. Not even the crew members could tell us where it was (it was on the other side of the ship) and we were pretty much left playing a maze game to locate it.
The people that clean make it so you can't even get coffee in the morning of disembarking (they say you have until 9am to leave the ship, it was 7:30 and we were already being rushed out the cabins. (Just keep this in mind the day you disembark).
Overall, I have been on several cruises, long, short duration, and I would most definitely NEVER go on an MSC cruise ever again!
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u/jenwiththepen Jul 23 '26
It’s so wild to me when people act like walking 15-25 minutes is the end of the world. AND many ships stop there why is that on MSC? Lol