I’ve just disembarked a cruise on one of the biggest and most exciting cruise ships in the entire world where I braved an 11 story slide and went to a secret bar that doesn’t exist on any of the deck plans the cruise was on board MC’s newest cruise ship the MSE World Europa
And MC definitely are a controversial Cruise Line plenty of people love them and plenty hate them with a passion normally when I book an mlc Cruise it’s because I found a bargain and I’ve paid half the price of a mainstream American or British Cruise Line This time though
I just really wanted to try this ship so I paid far more than I ever have for an MSE Cruise in the past and I hoped that I would get more in return the ship certainly looked impressive from the promotional videos if the bad reviews were to be believed I would be spending
The week hungry overwhelmed uncomfortable and generally miserable but I knew the only way to really find out was to get on board for myself we boarded the ship in Barcelona in Spain and as soon as we walked up to the world Europa I knew that this would be an interesting crew
Realizing that every tiny square like this was a balcony that would have between two and four people in it blew my mind a little bit the ship holds almost 9,000 people so I was worried that it would feel really busy and that we would be waiting ages for everything
It actually only took us 8 minutes to go through check-in security and to Embark the ship that is faster than almost any other cruise I’ve been on and it was a fantastic sign it reminded me why I really love cruising above flying can you imagine getting through an airport
In 8 minutes that is the dream on MSC cruises guests get on almost every day so the embarcation is spread out as the cruise went on I would find this great in some ways but Annoying in others when we walked in we were right in the middle of this incredible Central Street that
Stretches almost the length of the ship it’s lined with bars and shops and restaurants and it has an LED screen on the ceiling I would see whales on this screen a little later in the cruise which it was a bit odd to be literally on a ship looking up at Wales normally
If you’re doing that something has gone terribly wrong but it was really impressive World Europa cost $1.2 billion to build and in areas like this it certainly felt like it we were asked if we wanted to buy a specialty dining package and said no I knew that MSC had
A reputation for upselling but I never could have guessed the real number of times would be asked this question I did keep a log but right now that didn’t matter I just wanted to explore this ship my embarcation time was fairly early and that meant that when we
Boarded it was time for lunch we headed up to one of the buffet and I was very very happy with what we found cruise ships on embarcation day can often be extremely chaotic but it wasn’t too busy and there were loads of seats free I
Really like the design too but that b of course is personal choice there was a good variety of food and I of course went for some pizza vegetables bread and mozzarella because in my opinion that is what MSC do best they make the mozzarella fresh on board and I ate a
Lot of it during the cruise MSE do get a lot of complaints about their food but I I knew that if all the food was like this for the rest of the week I would be more than happy of course you can’t base a cruise Line’s food off of one meal
Though so I would have to keep eating it would turn out that this first buffet that we visited was the smaller of the two because there were two main big buffets one right on top of the other we would often sit in the outside area it
Wasn’t too cold and we would look down over the street that was at the back the prominade area looked incredible and I knew that we had to go down to check it out the scale was just unbelievable looking at the ship this way it was hard
To remember that this was a ship at all but then we would turn around and it would be confirmed by the ocean view our cruise was taking us around the Mediterranean and we had five ports on the schedule we would actually miss the first Port but at this point I had no
Idea that was going to happen I was just so excited to be in this space there were lots of things that I didn’t know on this first day on board I didn’t know this phone box was a secret passage that would take us to a secret bar I didn’t
Know how fast this slide would be and I had no idea that I would end up roller skating later in the cruise earlier in the year i’ taken a cruise on what I would say was the Royal Caribbean version of this ship Symphony Of The Seas I was looking forward to comparing
The two and I assumed that I would find things that I preferred about both MC are an Italian cruise line and because of that when I was stood here I was surrounded by people speaking Italian Spanish German Dutch French you name it I think I heard it on their ship it just
Added to the excitement for me personally I feel more like I’m actually abroad when I can’t understand what other people are saying I had booked a drinks package pre- Cruise so we decided to head to a bar to find a drink I don’t usually buy drinks packages but the
Price to buy an alcoholic package when booking the cruise was the same as booking a non-alcoholic package on board so I figured I really didn’t have a lot to lose all I had to do was to have one alcoholic drink and it was worthwhile and I did that on day one we headed
Outside to the main pool and this area was massive there were so many Sun lounges and little carts where you could get a drink instead of lining up and I was mostly drinking Coke Zero so they would just hand me the can which was absolutely perfect msse do sometimes get
Bad reviews about their service because it isn’t always overly friendly or above and beyond you ask for a thing and they give you the thing I love it but I think some people do want a bit more crew interaction just getting what I asked for with no additional banter that suits
Me perfectly it is important to remember that people are far more likely to take the time to review something if they didn’t have a good time so do always take review with a pinch of salt pinch of salt is your britishism of the week of course just meaning don’t take it too
Seriously whenever I hear somebody from the US say this phrase they always say a grain of salt but it definitely is pinch of salt in the UK so I’m not sure why we’re getting more salt than you let me know in the comments if it is a grain or
A pinch of salt where you’re from we quickly decided it was too chilly to sit outside so we headed to the inside pool area it was surprisingly quiet in there and I found one of the most impractical chairs in the world luckily I did manage
To climb back out at the top level there was a bar and we set up here to get our bearings I decided to go onto the MSC app on my phone there was the daily schedule on there and we could book things like theater shows I’m a massive
Fan of the theater so we decided to book every single show for every night during the cruise I also noticed that there was some shows in the back Lounge so I booked those too I figured I could always cancel if I changed my mind but I
Never did and I went to all of the shows I’ve watched a lot of MSE shows in the past with varying interests to me and I think really that is the best way to put it sometimes they are great sometimes they’re really really weird but they’re always entertaining and they’re only
Ever about half an hour long another thing that I could do on the app was that I could look at the menu for dinner I love love love love knowing in advance what is on the menu to be honest I probably could have used my memory as a
Lot of the menus had dishes that I recognized from my past MSE Cruises but still I like to be prepared MSE have both fixed and flexible dining and I use usually choose early dining if given the choice flexible is usually only available to people in Suites or people
Who’ve paid for a more expensive Cruise fair but I’ve never had any problems with the fixed dining and if I have been given late I’ve always been able to change it to the early with no problems I’ve been on five MSE Cruises before this in the Caribbean in Europe and out
Of the UK every day we would decide if we wanted to go to the main dining room or the buffet or the pizza and burger grab and go or maybe even a specialty restaurant we did do one of those during the Cruise there was no shortage of food
Options after dinner we headed to the theater to watch a show the cruise director came out and introduced himself in I think six languages and welcomed everyone who joined today in Barcelona I am constantly Amazed by people who can flick between languages so easily it is incredible I thought the show was good
If a little odd but that is to be expected the singers and the dancers they were all brilliant but it’s just a little tricky to create a theater show without really using language so sometimes they are a bit weird the majority of the songs were in English
And some were in Spanish or Italian or other languages to make up for the lack of spoken word and story it felt as though they had really invested in how many performers they had and what crazy crazy stunts they could do the costumes were very interesting too and I was able
To film which was amazing at one point we had two people zooming around a cage on motorcycles we had a lady hanging from her hair and this guy who would flip round and round and round it is important to remember this is on a ship a ship that is moving only slightly but
It is still moving this guy makes me feel so dizzy just watching him it is just bonkers the theater itself was fantastic there was not a pillar there was not a post there was nothing in sight and some of the chairs were wider than the others for some reason but they
Were very comfortable after a quick drink in the pub we decided to call it a nights I knew that we hadn’t seen half the ship yet but we did have the full week to explore and at this point I was still expecting us to go to marsill in
France the next stay but when I looked through the paperwork in our cabin I saw that it had been substituted with tulon in France due to bad weather that suited me fine I have missed port cover on my travel insurance and I have already been to marsill the bad weather didn’t cause
Much rocking and I didn’t feel seasick even though our cabin was right at the back the cabin did judder and it did vibrate a lot more than expected but overall the ship felt very stable and it was perfectly comfortable on a lot of smaller cruise ships breakfast will
Often end at 9 or 10 so I was very happy to find out that breakfast went on until 11:00 and then lunch started at 11:30 on paper the buffet hardly closed at all and in reality it never seemed to be completely closed even between the set
Times there would be a section with a few sandwiches and fruit available we would often come here to get a tea in these big mugs or a drink from the bar and it was in here that I saw a lady getting food from behind the screens before it was ready I usually do
Everything I can to avoid filming specific people when I cruise but I feel as though there’s no way anybody can identify this lady from this she wasn’t just sneaking around and grabbing a few things that were behind the screens she was walking around normally she was doing her complete normal buffet lunch
For a good few minutes just acting as if the screens weren’t there clearly she could not wait but it was weird MSC cruises are fantastic for people watching there’s normally a real mix of nationalities and Ages which just makes it so interesting next on my two explore
List was the casino and the big Lounge at the back I was looking forward to seeing some shows in there and I always do a € 10ur gamble when I cruise just in case the casino does have a smoking section and you do have to walk through
The casino to get to the lounge smoking is a lot more accepted in Italy than it is in England or America and as a result there are a lot of smoking areas on board including a smoking bar at the back of the ship the lounge was huge and
Very impressive it reminded me of the 270 Lounge on Symphony Of The Seas but the difference was was that this one on MSE wasn’t open during the day at all which I definitely thought was a shame it was technically open but the bar wasn’t so no one was really in there I
Wasn’t sure what was going on with this floor but it looked like a great venue heading outside I found a whole deck that I hadn’t found before with two pools a glass walkway and this massive snake Slide the pools were heated so I knew that I’d have to give it a try at
Some point you could see the steam coming off of the pools we cruised in Autumn but there were still a lot of people enjoying the outside spaces we would see a lot of people in the hot tubs and the kids would be enjoying the slides behind the slides I found a
Go-kart Arena which was also used as a roller skating rink I’d actually never roller skated before only rollerbladed but I figured a cruise would be as good a time as any to try it and I did later MSE World Europa has an area that is a new addition to their cruise ships
Usually on a cruise you’ll find a main dining room a buffet some poolside food included in the cruise fair but that’s normally about it on this ship they also added this massive area called pizza and a burger here you could get freshly made food and the best donuts anytime we
Decided to head here for lunch and I love being able to just pick up a little pot of onion rings or chicken nuggets I imagine this area would be great if you had kids and although MSE is very much a family cruise line it didn’t feel as
Though there were too many kids on board we were cruising outside the school holidays I suppose and the kids were mostly in the kids clubs I didn’t go anywhere near the kids clubs and I didn’t go near the gym well I did step in the gym to film this but that was
About it walking around this massive ship was exercise enough for me wandering down the Central Street we found this very random Corridor where you could smell different types of tea that really didn’t make much sense until I found the tea Lounge at the other end
It was such a lovely calm venue but it would be so easy to never find it the doors were always closed to keep it quiet and I’m sure that some people were never brave enough to just randomly walk in it was well worth walking in there though they had loads of types of
Cookies they were so good and they had a huge drinks menu all the drinks were included in our drinks package so we did stop by here fairly often there were a couple of other venues like this in the Central Street which were lovely but it would be very easy to never find the
Door to the karaoke bar for example was behind here and we did go to karaoke one evening later in the cruise everyone was singing in Spanish and Italian occasionally English too but I liked how they had the lyrics on the screens even if I had no idea what they were singing
I would still be following along with the words I have the highest loyalty status with msse and one perk I get from that is a free specialty meal on every single cruise we decided to stop at holl tacos to ask if we could use it there
The waitress said that we could and that we could eat right now if we wanted to we thought to ourselves sure we can eat now why not well really the why not should have been that we were not absolutely starving hungry because it turns out that this speciality meal was
All you can eat and we ordered everything from the menu they suggested we did the food was fantastic and we had frozen margaritas that were included in our drinks package these aren’t included in the drinks packages on all msse sailings but they were on this one it is
A complicated thing we had the higher drinks package so drinks were included everywhere apart from the secret bar that we would find later we always found the staff on board to be friendly and they didn’t seem as rushed or as busy as they have been on some of my past MSE
Cruises after dinner we headed to the big Lounge at the back and we watched a show that we booked earlier it started with two people handing out what I assume is prco while hanging from the lights this is not something I’ve seen on a cruise before and something I would
Normally expect on a Celebrity Cruise or maybe a virgin voyagers Cruise not necessarily msse we watched two shows in here as the cruise went on one which was a rock and roll themed show and the other was disco both the shows were great the singers and the dancers were
Fantastic and it was just such a fun vibe in the room the dancers would come up and they would dance within the crowd too some people did get dancers wiggling right in their faces my favorite place to spend my evenings was on my balcony not watching the sea or the views but
Watching everybody else dancing below they had a silent disco out here one day and every day the trees would do a light show to the music as we sailed away there would be a DJ and everyone was just having such a good time it was very
Relaxed and I like that I knew that I still wanted to go on this slide and that I wanted to go roller skating the daily schedule told me when these would be open and it also told me that tomorrow would be what MSE call for foral night formal night where you can
Dress up just like this our cruise took us to tulon genua chiv Chia and Veta we headed to the aquarium in genu where I filmed this just wait for it there he goes we were so lucky with the weather in Veta and I even took my jumper off at
Some point that’s a sweatshirt if you’re not from the UK it was when we were in chiv Chia that we decided to brave the 11 story slide purely because we were at the top of the ship after having breakfast and we needed to get down to
Get off so my might as well go by slide we had to sign a waiver and the crew member working at the top warned us that the slide would be slow I’d seen lots of people slide down it from my cabin and it seemed fast enough from the outside
But from inside it felt very very slow for me that was fantastic though because the sides of the slide were glass and I could film The View on the way down you were allowed to film I didn’t find the slide scary at all not compared to the
Drop slides that I’ve tried on other cruise ships in the past but that was good I do like a nice calm slide another thing we had to sign a waiver for was roller skating they gave us the skates and the helmets and we were the only
People on the rink when we started by the end a couple had joined us but it was really quite quiet that was one of the main benefits of guests getting on and off every single day that meant that in the late morning and the early afternoon there was a big percentage of
People that had already disembarked the ship and the new people hadn’t arrived yet I’ve certainly been on some busy MSC Cruisers in the past but this ship didn’t feel like it at all if I had to guess why I would guess that this ship spread the people out quite well the
Theater and the main dining room were the only times that we would see big groups and even then it wasn’t too many it felt as though almost everybody came out to see the captain speak one thing that was annoying about people getting on and off every day was that we would
Be asked if we wanted a specialty dining package all day every day I started counting and I was asked between 3 to six times a day sometimes even when I was eating in the buffet or when I was eating somewhere else which was weird the crew were always so friendly and
They were so lovely and we had a lot of nice conversations with them but I felt so bad that clearly they’ been sent out with a clipboard and told you have to ask every person you see do they want a specialty dining package even if this is
The sixth time they’ve been asked today and they’ve been asked for the last 4 days I do have a couple of friends who do an MSE upsell challenge where they try and walk from one end of the ship to the other without getting stopped and ask to buy something which is quite
Funny it was okay it was just repetitive and if that is the reason that Ms cruises are usually cheaper I will take it I’ll let you know how much I paid for this cruise at the end of the video we decided to have lunch in the main dining
Room and we were in and out within an hour which I really like we were always asked if we wanted more drinks and I was amazed by the waiter’s ability to switch between languages when moving between the different tables I don’t think I could even remember which table was
Which language let alone speaking those languages the default way to look at the menus was on your phone using the QR code but they do have paper menus for people that want them food is very subjective so I will let you decide if you’d be happy with these menus and with
This food I have a full guide on my website with photos of every single dish we were always happy and I’d never described MC’s food as particularly Gourmet but we certainly weren’t hungry the bread is always so good too it’s one of the best cruise lines for bread MSE
Are a very casual Cruise Line when it comes to dress codes and in the day there are no rules apart from no swimwear in the restaurants basically you have to be dressed and that’s about it it they have one night a week which is their former night but I’ve never
Seen it being en forced much and there are lots of places you can go to avoid the dress code we did decide to take part in the formal night and it just so happened that this would be the day that we would be invited to the secret bar
These little tokens arrived in my cabin and scanning the QR code gave me instructions on how to book a time slot I did that and when it was our time we had to go to the phone box to call a number this part was kind of awkward
Because the box was being used as a photo spot so the people who were behind us who I think were Italian just thought that me and my brother were taking ages to take a photo inside this box they kind of asked us what we were doing we tried to explain but without speaking
Italian and I think they got the message I’m not sure I do have more information about the bar on my website so check out that link if you’re interested in that after a little while the back of the box opened and we were taken through to the
Crew areas I expected the bar to be just behind the door but it was actually quite far away the bar was swe easy themed and there was was live music playing the venue definitely felt exclusive and we both had a cocktail sadly for me even though we had the
Highest drinks package there were no included drinks served in this bar at all and the two drinks cost us €38 the drinks were nice enough the STA were fantastic and the venue was very cool but that cost probably would put me off if I wasn’t doing research for this
Channel just because my drinks were already included in every other bar on the ship still I suppose it is more about the experience than the actual drinks and we did have a good evening nobody knows how you get an invite to this bar and you’re not meant to ask the
Capacity is just 70 and I’m pretty sure they book in hour slots so there’s definitely not enough time for everybody I loved having a drinks package on this cruise but it is not something that I usually get the value out of I paid £ 13455 for this cruise and that included
All of my daily tips and gratuities my drinks package and my balcony cabin that faced inside the ship the only extra money I spent on this Cruise was €10 in the casino and that price is based per person so I paid that price and my brother also paid that price the cruise
Was slightly cheaper than the Royal Caribbean equivalent that I took and this one included a drinks package whereas my Royal Caribbean one didn’t one thing I did prefer about my msse cruise was the view from my balcony cabin to find out what I loved about it and why some things like this bathroom
Door drove me absolutely bananas check out this video next
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