We Got MSCed

(Alternate titles for this post, provided by my various family members and cruise buddies after a few glasses of wine: My Sad Cruise; MSCellaneous Adventures; Miserable, Shitty, and Crappy)

Grab your popcorn, folks. It’s time for another shitshow post. Not all the days are winners.

So, a quick note before I get negative, in case you didn’t see my fairly recent “I love cruises” post or you’re some rando who’s never met us. (Why are you reading this? Go find something interesting!) We love cruises and are not picky, snobby travelers. We’ve been on the smallest, oldest ship in the Carnival fleet (no joke, we got married on it) and we still loved it. We’ve had cruises cut short for hurricanes, and we didn’t complain a bit. We are not hard to please, is what I’m saying. We are also fully aware that even a bad cruise is still a very, very nice place to be. We are comparing this to other cruises - not to normal life. Keep that in mind as you listen to my rant, so you can understand that this is not just one of a million bad reviews I’ve written. It takes a lot for a business to piss me off.

First thing - not the fault of the cruise line - we couldn’t find an uber or taxi to save our lives the morning of embarkation. That meant we started our boarding process with a bit of chaos from step one. We ended up walking from our hotel to the port shuttle pickup place. Not a huge deal, but it was unexpected and a bit rushed. Plus we are currently traveling with one big-ass duffel that has been added to the mix of otherwise-carry-on-only luggage. This is to allow us to smuggle skateboards onto planes and cruises, but it’s also become a catch-all bag for rain jackets and liquids and shoes and whatever. We’ve only had it for a month or so, and we might ditch it at any point, but for today, poor Mike had to haul that bulky anchor all the way to the port. Again, this wasn’t the fault of the cruise line, but it set the stage for the day. We all kept pretty good attitudes about it - minor grumpiness, but that’s fine - because we were excited to just get there and get on board. Then we could relax!

Picture this, but with each of us carrying a lot of luggage.

Oh, let me also add in that I just happened to re-open our boarding documents the night before, and in doing so I noticed that somewhere deep in there it mentioned a check-in time of 10am. “Don’t arrive before 10am, but also your check-in window closes at 11am.” Well dang, glad I read the fine print! 

So anyway, we walked the half-hourish walk to the shuttles, loaded our bags on and then ourselves, and took the short ride the rest of the way to the port. We arrived just a few minutes after 11:00, so I was fairly confident they hadn’t actually closed the check-in for us. (They hadn’t.) I did notice some odd things from other passengers. Like, instead of checking in and then heading toward the ship, most of them were taking their bags and heading back out of the check-in area. Weird. But whatever. We knew this ship was going to have people getting on and off the ship at every port of call, so we didn’t think much of it.

Then it was our turn, and the lady asked if we were going to Brazil. Yes. She proceeded to tell us that, despite everything we had read in the countless emails MSC had sent in the previous weeks, we needed to have negative COVID tests to get on board. She showed us an email (in Portuguese) that we were supposed to have received. We had not received this email. Not in Portuguese, English, nor any other language. We had received at least half a dozen other emails explaining that we didn’t even really need to be vaccinated and masks were optional. Nothing saying that Brazil was requiring us to have a negative test. (We are all vaxxed and boosted, by the way.) We read every email as it came in. Each one mentioned important COVID procedures to follow, so each time we read them to make sure we were in compliance. At one point, Mike even said, “These emails keep making me nervous, like we need to get tested or something.” I agreed, which is why we read every one. But every time we came to the same conclusion - if you’re vaccinated, no testing is required. 

But here we were at the port, and we were being told that we were wrong, that we did need tests to get on board. From there the conversation was more or less the words below. I’m skipping quotes because there was a lot of frustration and repeated conversation.

Okay, fine. Where do you test us?
We don’t test you here. You need to take a taxi back into town to get a test.
What the fuck? Is that what all these other people are having to do too?
Yes.
So, clearly lots of people didn’t get this email that we were supposed to have read, right?
Yes, it appears that way.
So, this is MSC’s fault. Got it. So, are they paying for the taxis? Will they hold the ship for us?
No, you have to pay for the taxis. We have them coming for everyone. 10 euros per person there, 10 euros per person back. And you have to pay for the tests, too. You could take the free shuttle back partway, but then you still have to walk back into town.
Will they hold the ship for us?
We don’t know. We don’t work for MSC. We work for the port. You have till 2:00 before check-in closes.
Fuuuuuck. Where is the taxi even taking us? Do they know? How the hell do we know where to go?
The taxi driver will take you there. 
Fine. Where can we leave our luggage while we go?
Yeah, no, you need to haul that all back with you. We can’t keep it here.
Seriously? There isn’t a single MSC employee who could stand here by everyone’s bags? How about that guy who’s standing over there like a useless scarecrow, just holding a sign that says “Welcome Bienvenuti” with no smile on his face? He doesn’t look too busy.
No, the bags have to go with you.
Okay, we just used the last of our euros. Does the taxi driver take credit card?
No.
(Of course not. Why would anyone accept a credit card in 2022?)
Jesus Christ. Is there an ATM? And by the way, is there a water fountain somewhere? We just walked all the way here, and we’re hot, sweaty, and thirsty.
No, sorry.
Could we get someone from MSC off the ship to come and help everyone with this? 
Nope.

The conversation looped around like this for a while. The port people were (I think) as annoyed at the whole situation as we were, but they weren’t the ones who were potentially about to miss their vacation and/or transportation across the world. (Vacation for the other guests, I mean. But for us, this was how we were getting to the next leg of our trip.)

Eventually we got into a taxi shuttle with a few other passengers, including a woman with her 3-year old who had called in to MSC a few days before to make sure she knew what was needed and had been told that her son needed to be tested (so he was) but she could definitely skip it (so she had). At the testing center, there were lines and groups of people, all of whom spoke different languages from us and each other. One group standing across the street was surrounded by piles of luggage. They said something to us in Italian? Portuguese? No idea. We think they were probably being nice and offering to watch our luggage since they were in the same boat (so to speak), but it was just as likely that they were saying we could pay them to watch it…so we just left the kids there with the bags while we tried to figure out the next steps. 

The testing center was - no surprise - completely overwhelmed by this sudden influx of confused foreigners who all had large bags and angry faces. All the signs were in Italian, and there were two rooms/buildings next to each other that we had to go into. We couldn’t tell what was what. I think even if we’d spoken fluent Italian, we still would have been lost. All the passengers kind of pieced together words of Portuspanenglitalian and helped point each other in the right direction. Mike and I grabbed forms to fill out for each of our family members. The forms asked a whole lotta questions that we couldn’t answer, but we did our best. In the process, my elbow brushed by a glass shelf on the wall, and that was enough to tear the screw out of the drywall. In order to save the glass, Mike just ripped the whole damn thing the rest of the way off and put it on the floor. There was so much chaos in the place that nobody even noticed. I did laugh imagining some poor custodian going in to clean that night and wondering what the hell happened. (Sorry, whoever you are!)

Thank god we were finally able to get the tests and we could even pay with a credit card. And we were all negative, though there was a brief bit of panic when they couldn’t find Sagan’s printout and we assumed it was because they’d segregated the positive tests or something. 

While we waited, we made friends with another guy from Florida who had also called into MSC a few days before (twice!) and had been told (twice!) that, no, he didn’t need a COVID test to board. 

Yet another guy we met said - and this one I think is a bit on him - that this exact same thing had happened to him on a previous MSC cruise the year before. Dude! Why did you come back again? Hahaha! (He did laugh at himself for this and admitted that he couldn’t resist the low price.) 

But my point is, this clearly wasn’t a case of us dropping the ball. MSC screwed up in a big way, and it wasn’t their first time. At the time we were told we needed the tests, there had already been about 40 people before us. I’m quite sure it was double that before the day was done.

Forty, or even eighty, passengers on a typical cruise doesn’t seem like a big percentage. But here’s something else different/weird/bad about MSC: it feels more like a shuttle service than a cruise. In theory this is a good thing, and it was a factor in us deciding to take this cruise. We really needed transportation more than a vacation, so we figured why not take a cruise across the Atlantic instead of a plane? We’d done this once before, in 2008. (That experience was wonderful, by the way. A Carnival ship and one of the nicest we’ve been on.) MSC lets people use their ships like hop-on hop-off buses. I think we’re getting off on the last stop, but we didn’t get on at the first. So the day we got on, those of us who were getting on in Civitavecchia and got hosed with the COVID test bullshit…I think we made up quite a bit of the passenger population for that embarkation. Transatlantic or repositioning cruises also tend to have much smaller numbers on board in general, so this wasn’t a small drop in the ocean.

You’d think, then, that MSC would pre-emptively make an announcement, send an email, or even just put a note in our cabin, apologizing for the mistake, right? Nope. Not a word. When we walked through that spot where they take your picture when you board, so you can buy a crappy, overpriced memory later, I told the guy that I did not want to remember this day at all. He didn’t press me beyond that and nodded knowingly.

I waited a few hours and then went to the reception desk to see what they were planning to do to compensate all the passengers who had been through hours of physical and mental stress, tears, and unexpected costs due to their fuck-up. (I’m sure we were the passengers who had the easiest time of it all, since we aren’t unhealthy or elderly and didn’t have a 3-year old in tow, for instance.) The guy was polite and said, “This is the first I’ve heard of this.” Hm. That seemed unlikely, but there wasn’t anything I could do to prove he was lying. He talked to his manager and said they would contact us later to see what they could do. Fine.

Mike decided to talk to them later as well, when we hadn’t heard anything back. He got the same response. “This is the first we’re hearing of this.” Ha! Lying assholes. 

The next day we received “romance packages” to our two cabins. A bottle of champagne and some desserts that we could just as easily have gotten up at the buffet. We drank the bubbly and nibbled on the sweets, but this was hardly what we were hoping for. 

We decided on that first night to try our hardest (kids included) to find nice things to say about the ship and/or MSC. So far we’ve come up with liking their full-size mugs and big plates at the buffet.

The best things on an MSC cruise.

There are other things that are almost nice, but they’re all done in such a weird way that it’s a wash at best. Like, we realized that there are close to zero announcements over the loudspeaker. Those constant updates on regular cruises are super annoying, so the quiet is good...except nobody knows a damn thing that’s happening, ever. I have yet to hear the voice or name of the captain. We weren’t aware that we were supposed to do the safety/muster station thing the day we boarded, until we got a note saying we’d missed it. (So they can send notes when they want to, it seems.) At the reception desk, I heard one man asking how and when he was supposed to get off the ship, because he’d received no instruction and was disembarking in a couple days. When we got to port in Marseille, they never even announced it! You just had to notice that, hey, we’ve stopped. I guess we should go see where they’ve brought us!

We didn’t get a message about attending the mandatory safety meeting until they chastised us by letter in our cabin the day after we missed it. So it turns out they are able to send letters to the cabin quickly when it matters to them.

Ready for anything!

The food is good. They have more vegetarian options than other cruises. And the quicker sit-down dinner pace is actually better for me. (I really don’t need a meal to last 90 minutes.) The portions are smaller, but I enjoy every bite. Of course, that also means we need to hit the buffet afterwards for more food, but I like not gorging myself at every meal.

And the buffet…well, the food there is good as well. But the timing of the place is baffling. The first day, all the stations were open every time we went in. They were labeled pretty well for what foods they offered, and there was even a “Vegetarian and Healthy” section (though Mike pointed out it really should say “Vegetarian OR Healthy” to be more accurate - mashed potatoes are just one of those two). The “Beverage Stations” left something to be desired. Coffee urns were mostly full, of not good coffee. Milk, empty. Juice dispensers weren’t working. You could go to another beverage station, but most of them were closed off for no obvious reason. 

And then on Day 2, the schedule of what was open or not seemed to be completely different. The signs were mostly still the same, but you had to walk all the way around the restaurant to find what was available. By the time you got back to where you started, some of those open stations might be closing.

On most cruises these days, they’ve gotten smart. They have two sides to the buffet, and usually one is open while the other is being cleaned and prepped for the next meal. They also have signs and staff gently pointing you to the open side, with smiles on their faces.

Not MSC, though. No, their preferred method is to randomly place CLOSED signs in front of one platter of food within a station, while still having all the other foods readily available. Or at least they look readily available. You never know until you try, and sometimes a staff member will snap at you for trying. They take it to the next level when they put plastic wrap on the shelves to block you from grabbing whatever is on display. It’s never clear whether the food is coming or going when that’s the case. Most often I see this with uncut fruit, and that seems like…I mean, why not just have that always available? The waste of all that plastic wrap alone kills me and makes MSC’s pledge to minimize their environmental impact a joke. How about you invest in some kind of shutter for the food stations, MSC?

Related, the water service is weird and unnecessarily wasteful as well. The tap water is presumably safe to drink, because they leave drinking glasses in your room (only two, never more). But if you order water anywhere on the ship, they bring you bottles of it. Some passengers are allowed sparkling water as well, and it’s unlimited, but only at sit-down lunch and dinner (except the few times we ordered it elsewhere and got it with no problem?). And they don’t charge you for them, but they still have to swipe your key card and sign for every bottle. I mean…what? It’s all so stupid. Towels are a similar situation. You get exactly the number of towels you’re allotted and no more. These are not fancy towels, which is totally fine with us, but they act like everyone on board is definitely desperate to steal them. You get one beach towel per person in your cabin, and you better be damn sure those towels come back down to your cabin with you if you use one at the pool. I’m all for reducing the waste of laundry, but it starts to feel like you’re an inmate instead of a guest. The staff on board (as opposed to the higher-ups) are all pretty great. This has to be ten times more annoying for them, right? In fact, my best guess with the sparkling water thing is that MSC is trying to prevent their employees from stealing it, which feels shitty. Don’t treat your people like that.

Free-ish to drink?

The water is safe to drink, but do not flush your electronics, no matter how tempting it is.

I think it was the third day when we got back on board from a port stop, and it was about 6:30pm. Too early for our official dinner seating, but we were starving. The buffet made more sense for dinner that time, so we headed up there. And guess what - it was closed! Because why would anybody want to eat dinner at 6:30pm? They did offer pizza and french fries, plus one or two beverage stations were maybe open and partially functioning. But you had to wait till 7:00 for most of the food, at which point you could already be at dinner at the real restaurant anyway.

Siiigh. All of these are first world problems, for sure. But it’s not the lack of food that’s annoying. It’s the unnecessary complications of a broken system. Why in the world would they change the buffet times from day to day? Especially when you are allowing passengers on and off your ship like a shuttle bus, don’t you want some things to be consistent? And if you must change them frequently, go ahead and add in some signage about when passengers can expect things to be available, rather than having a bunch of confused, hungry, annoyed people milling around and stopping your employees every few steps to ask questions. It’s so inefficient.

What I keep thinking over and over is, what a waste of a nice ship. It really is nice. Comfortable spaces, beautiful design. And the staff seem nice and hard-working as well, but they are almost as clueless as the passengers. I’m not calling them dumb by any means, but MSC hasn’t trained these poor employees at all, and I think that’s on purpose. 

Here’s an example of one very small, very telling issue we had. Sagan has discovered he loves crossword puzzles. Most cruise ships have a library on board, and most of those libraries have daily crossword puzzles, sudoku, and trivia games available for the passengers. Sagan set out to find the library right away. He saw it on the map, with various listings about its location. There was also a “cyberlibrary” listed, but he was looking for the one with books. He tried to follow the map but wasn’t having any luck. The spot where it was supposed to be was basically air above an indoor pool. So then he started asking staff. He asked several of them and was given a different answer by each. One sent him to the cyberlibrary. One sent him back to the pool. One told him he had no idea. And so on. So then we joined in the hunt. The four of us wandered around all the possible options, but there was nothing. Eventually we wound up in this room where you can pay to “drive” an F1 simulator. We chatted with the guy in there, told him about our hunt, and he became as curious as we were. He called reception to ask but got no answer (of course). He asked the guy working with him, who had no idea. He eventually called housekeeping and sort of got an answer - that there was a library, but it is now in the cyberlibrary, and it has no books, no puzzles, no staff. It hasn’t since COVID started, because they took all the communal items off the ship and haven’t yet brought them back on.

We found the library/cyberlibrary/not a library at all! (Like Mike’s slippies?)

Our F1 buddy also explained that MSC employees get moved around from ship to ship all the time, so they never really get to know one well before they’re transferred again. He tried to explain that COVID has also made things very difficult, but we told him that MSC was just using that bullshit to make excuses. We were on Norwegian just a month or so prior, and things were smoother than ever on that cruise. He seemed genuinely surprised, because MSC has been shoveling this “our hands are tied due to COVID” crap at them for years now.

Once we knew that, it became even more obvious how untrained everyone is on board. I’ve watched staff being shown how to refill the coffee. I’ve overheard countless staff asking each other where something is. Sagan actually saw a guy carrying a stretcher during a medical emergency today asking, “Where’s the spa?” At port, we wandered around with a large group of crew on their day off, as we all tried to figure out how the hell to get into the city. At one point one of them asked, “Should we just get back on the ship and sleep all day instead?” 

The maps haven’t been updated in years. They list a squash court, but it’s basically sealed up. There’s a basketball hoop but no balls. I think the reception staff are given no power to make decisions that will keep guests happy, because it’s easier if they are telling the truth when they say, “I’m sorry, I’ll have to ask my manager.” Most cruises are quick to offer at least some onboard credit to shut up complaints. It costs the cruise line basically nothing and makes everyone happier. This feels way too similar to the Google Fi bullshit of “sorry, it’s just the algorithms.” These are signs of businesses that are not run well from the top. Good businesses train their employees well and trust them to care for the customers without needing to go up the chain for every small issue.

Now, we aren’t sitting here fuming and being miserable on the cruise, in case you’re wondering. On the contrary, I think all this idiocy has become our replacement entertainment. We’ve bonded with other passengers over the COVID testing chaos. We’ve shared our champagne with a couple of them and had dinner together, where we laugh about all the stupid things we see each day. (And you can be sure I’ve told all the others I’ve seen on board to go complain until they at least get some champagne, too. MSC is gonna hate our family by the end of this.) We’re still finding our fun, and all still agree that these are far from tragic problems.

Enjoying our conciliatory champagne with two other victims of MSC’s chaos.

I’ve developed a theory that, much like the Dread Pirate Roberts from “Princess Bride,” at some point along the way, the real crew was replaced by pirates. The pirates decided it would be smart to keep the passengers in the dark about who’s in charge to avoid panic, so they’re all faking being crew and doing the best they can without knowing how anything works. The real crew is tied up somewhere down below. If you look at it that way, they’re actually doing a pretty good job. 

We looked to see who owns this cruise line, and it’s one Italian family. The daughter is the CFO, and the son is the president of shipping. My guess is that neither one of those nepotism babies has ever been on an MSC cruise. Or if they have, they certainly weren’t traveling among the crew or even the usual passengers. What I wouldn’t give to meet those two, join them on a not-fancy cruise on any other cruise line, and then bring them onto an MSC one, Undercover Boss-style. It would be hilarious.

My last thoughts on this are that MSC is really screwing the pooch on this thing in one more way. If they wanted to, they could get away with the chaos and cheapness by owning it and calling it “socially responsible.” You don’t want to have unlimited buffet foods for your guests all day and night? Cool, we don’t need that anyway. But say you’re doing it to reduce waste and promote healthier eating. You don’t have enough staff to make the announcements all day long? Great! Tell us that you respect our desire for a quieter cruise experience. The fact that you’re basically a glorified ferry? Make that a selling point! It’s Choose Your Own Adventure! Pretend it’s all done with intention, and we’ll believe it. Get your shit together, or at least fake it better, MSC. I’d suggest you hire me to do your PR, but nah. I’m pretty confident this was my last MSC experience.

Not a glorified ferry.