short review MSC Musica, July 8 to 15, 2006

Early July 2006 we traveled from our home town near Geneva, Switzerland
to board the brand new ship of MSC. The 7 day cruise went round trip
from Venice, IT to Bari, IT; Katakolon, GR (for Olympia); Izmir, TK;
Istanbul, TK; sea day; Dubrovnik, CR and back to Venice. It was the
second sailing for the new ship and nothing major went wrong. We were a
party of 10 pax in two inside and one outside cabin (three generations
of family for 70th birthday cruise). Cabins are spacious enough but not
huge (14 sqm which is about 145 sq ft). The ship has 1275 cabins, can
carry up to 3000 passengers and is well laid out. It also has a
delicate décor, quite sober and soft colors. The passenger mix for
this cruise was about 90 percent Italians and some German, French,
English and Spanish speaking guests.
The nice things about the ship are its two separate restaurants (each
on a different deck and one floor only), the spacious bathrooms of the
cabins, the long promenade deck circling 3 quarters of the ship. The
shows in the theater were excellent and very entertaining. The food was
tasteful and we got small portions for dinner, which is good IMO. You
can always ask more. The less good things about the ship and this
cruise would be the extremely noisy crowd on the pool deck, the
disappointing lay out of the pool deck (the views and "passenger
stream" are blocked by the hot tubs that are kind of "built up"
on the deck, as if they had been added subsequently), lay out of the
cafeteria (not enough drink stations) and no open aft or middle deck
for outdoor lunch or breakfast, way too many public announcements, few
TV channels, no web cam on the cabin's TV (especially annoying for
the inside cabins not knowing what it is like outside when waking up in
the morning), no free ice cream in the afternoon.
The ship felt very crowded and it probably is because in summer in the
Mediterranean everyone is out on deck.
The itinerary was fabulous and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Because of an
issue with the seating in the restaurant, a 20 Euro note (25 USD) to
the Maitre D allowed us to have dinner in the aft restaurant on the
Deck 13 (during day time it is part of the cafeteria). That gave us
beautiful views and it was much quieter up there. The crew was in
general not as friendly as on other ships, maybe newly trained and not
used to serving ship's passengers. We also noted that the number of
crew around to help (deck, wait staff, cabin stewards) was lower than
on cruise lines we had sailed previously. Maybe this explains the
unbeatable prices MSC has to offer (kids sharing in 3rd and 4th bed
always free)
A nice thing was that the captain walked every morning on the pool deck
(checking out the ship's status?). My wife, who speaks quite some
Italian, managed to make an appointment to visit the bridge later that
day. Although we have seen ship's bridges in the past, some other
family members found it an interesting experience.

I am available for additional info if you wish.

Frank
Geneva, Switzerland