Can you guess what information is going to get shared in this post? I bet you can, you smart little cookie.
But first it’s time to summarise what new travel content has been published on the site since the last of these blogs/newsletters.
Keeping with the theme of new cruises, we’ve just started posting accounts from the first cruise we took in 2023. That was a fly-cruise aboard the P&O Cruises ship Azura to the Adriatic. Four articles are up, covering the night before the flight then time at the disembarkation port looking around with some time on the ship before and after that.
In Before The Cruise On Azura: Gatwick Airport And Hotel you can see which hotel we picked and why. Look, this is the sort of thing that some people will want to know. No, I don’t get it, either.
Our cruise started and ended in Malta. The first post from this new country for us covers some time on the cruise ship in the port. We’d arrived super-early – almost the first people on board the ship – but wanted to drop off our hand luggage in our room before exploring ashore and that meant waiting until the rooms were ready for that.
From the front of the cruise ship we could see the sand-coloured, bastioned fortifications of Malta’s capital, Valletta, and decided to take a walk along the shoreline. We got as far along as the Bell Siege War Memorial before seeking some shade from the Maltese sunshine which, naturally, involved a bar. And an uncomfortable encounter. But we liked Valletta a lot.
The last post from this first day of the cruise on Azura just shows a few of the views from our balcony in the late afternoon and evening along with the food and drink we had aboard. It ended up being an early night for us thanks to that morning flight.
One other bit of information ahead of the new cruise booking news.
I’ve made a tweak to the Tags page on this site which splits out the specific cruise tags into their own section now so as not to overwhelm the group beginning with C. I suspect I’m the only person who ever views that page anyway because I do like to organise things and find things easily, but there it is anyway.
Okay. About that booking of a new cruise.
We didn’t have any annual leave days left for this year so the only way we’d be able to get on another cruise in 2024 would be if it was incredibly short and over a weekend and/or included the one remaining bank holiday day we’d not booked anything across at the end of May.
Enter the scene, MSC Cruises.
MSC have a bit of a reputation, and it’s not a good one. Some people have great experiences and some people can’t stand them. Their ships are flashy but the service is reputedly shoddy and occasionally surly. They are the epitome of a Marmite cruise line. When we mentioned on Instagram that we were thinking about booking a cheeky 2-nighter to France the replies we received from friends who’d cruised with them already ranged from “We love them” to “They’re pretty awful” and that made our minds up for us. We’d simply have to book the cruise to form our own opinion.
The cruise will be aboard MSC Virtuosa, sailing on a Saturday and returning on the bank holiday Monday with the Sunday spent in Cherbourg. There are plenty of red flags about such a cruise:
- It’s too short to truly form an opinion about the cruise line and all it offers.
- It’s short enough and cheap enough to attract a noisier, boozier crowd.
- We visited Cherbourg once before on a Saturday when practically nothing was open so a Sunday visit doesn’t bode well.
But the base price was very good. Naturally, we’ve bumped up that base price to be able to select our cabin with a balcony and tack on the drinks package. We’re hoping we get enough of an idea about the food and drink, the service, and what it would be like to cruise with MSC on longer trips as some of their itineraries look interesting and appear to be priced fairly well. We’ve also taken advantage of MSC’s loyalty-matching programme to get us Diamond level membership based on the Elite membership we already have with Princess. Whether we’ll be able to get much benefit from that across two nights remains to be seen but it’s another thing to consider for the future if the MSC experience doesn’t horrify us.
MSC are doing an identical itinerary at the beginning of May too and some of the other replies we received from fellow cruise fans stated that they were trying out MSC for the first time too for that sailing so it’s a chance for some positive publicity for the cruise line to counter some of the more negative stories that have recently circled on social media.
That brings this update to a close. We’re under five weeks away from our next cruise of the year so loads of time to get more posts up in the meantime.