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Thank you for your comment: we do have another video of Prima that shows a bit more of a ship including venues, entertainment, etc. This particular walkthrough is just to get a hang of a ship layout. Have a fantastic time, 26 nights is something else!

There is no dedicated piano bar, but there was live music every evening in the atrium and in the Metropolitan lounge on deck 7 aft. There is no brew house, but the but the Local Bar and Grill on deck 8 had an OK selection of beers on tap and plenty of TVs

Thanks! Was there a solo piano player in any of those venues? Atrium? bar?

@@anthonymccarthymusicandact6361 I do not recall seeing a solo piano player. Usually it was a duo or a small band. They were all decent, but not the best we have seen on seven seas.

Thank you for your comment! We hear you! We also found that both Improv and Syd Norman's were tiny and many other locations (Observation Lounge) were way too small for the ship of this size. I think what made our cruise, was access to Vibe Beach Club. While we had to pay for it, it was the best money we spent cruising: adults only area with plenty of loungers and a bar... Without Vibe I'm afraid we would have found Prima rather crowded as well...

Thank you so much for your suggestions, we will be sure to check those places out next time we are in San Juan!

Thank you for your comment! Thanks goodness we all have a choice, and given that choice we would gladly pay for Vibe again. It is not just to filter out kids, but also to keep area less busy and more enjoyable, as they only sell so many passes for each sailing...

@@alex_irina NCL tends to nicle and dime more so than others- I love the comedians onboard Carnival- so can I expect same level of comedy ( since you stayed you walked out)? massive ship for small and tight venues;

@@melissacolon5842 we agree on the venues: it would be nice to have more options, but overall main theater was adequate for us. Comedians come and go, so one was good, the other bad, but overall entertainment was enjoyable. We have not sailed with Carnival, but have been with all other major (and not so major) lines, so NCL is in the middle of the pack in our ratings. We got what we expected!

Thank you for detailed comment! I'm reasoably certain that on a few recent cruises with Royal, MSC and Celebrity out of Florida we did not see any extra charges on our statement, nor we experienced limited beverage service we had in Galveston. Common trend is that we had beverage package on all of these cruises, differences are states and Cruise line. Very well can be that Royal group "eats" taxes or there could be a state thing that does not allow that to happen in TX. Either way, it is an extremely minor thing, being aware of it just helped us to not even think about it in the future... Thank you again!

Thank you and glad you enjoyed our video! Vibe passes is a bit of a mess from what we observed. We booked cruise 3 months prior to sailing date. At the time no Vibe passes were available. We kept watching NCL app religiously twice a day and got lucky with a single pass (assuming someone canceled). We called NCL, begged them, asked our TA, but there was no way to get a second pass at the time. About two weeks before sailing we called NCL again and got lucky with the agent, who understood our frustration and the fact that a single pass is useless to us, so she got us a second pass. There are rumors that certain number of passes is reserved to be sold on board only, but we do not have solid facts to substantiate...

@@alex_irina that’s exactly my situation. We have one pass, I’ve chatted them them over a dozen times, and nothing. Now that we’re a week away, Vibe only gives me errors online, and even the agent last night said she can’t even look at it to see if there are any available. It’s been a nightmare TBH.

@@davidmcottrell ugh, sorry to hear that, but that was exactly our experience... We were planning to rush to the customer service once we are on board: rumors are, passes sell out quickly. Our backup plan was to just not worry about it and use one pass. I think if you are nice to staff there, they will be OK with that. Vibe access is a sliding door that is opened by a room key and no one is at the door to check. However, staff do have a printout of all guests and we noticed that they check and challenge guests who are not on the list... But that usually happens when they see a group they have never seen before that acts like they own the place... Hope you get this sorted out, as I said, that was our big headache as well before sailing... Cheers and good luck!

So sorry we walked so quickly through a casino! Next time we will spend more time there :) I'm sure you will have fun on your cruise! Happy sailing!

Oh-oh, that is unfortunate! We have never experienced any limitations on drinks out of Miami or Fort Lauderdale (but never sailed from Tampa), hopefully Florida is not getting greedy (as Texas apparently did)... Thank you for your comment!

It's hard to understand for sure. I'm heading on the cruise you took, in February and I found your review/video to be so informative and good. Thank you for helping me to be prepared 😁

@@melissalichty8180 thank you so much! Glad you found our review helpful! We always read and watch a lot preparing for our next cruise and it certainly helps to hear all different opinions and compare! Cheers and enjoy your cruise on Prima!

Thank you for your comment and glad you enjoyed your cruise! We agree: complimentary restaurants were very good/excellent. However we did enjoy Mexican and French restaurants. Mexican was a surprise for us, as we live in Dallas and have a lot of solid Mexican restaurants here, but the one on the ship was very pleasant. Same for French. Or maybe we are just happy to have good food after we were fed such a subpar mess on MSC ;)

Спасибо, Стас! Тебя также с Новым Годом и Рождеством!

Thank you for sharing your experience and sorry that the weather did not cooperate for you! Prima is definitely built for warm and sunny weather with so much outdoor space! When it rained on us in Cozumel, we noticed right away how crowded it gets inside... Cheers!

How interesting, thank you for sharing that on Carnival and different ports. We mainly sail from Florida, so this was rather unexpected and odd for us. Oh well, we will have to work with our politicians to change that stupid tax :))

Thank you! I wish I could definitively confirm Vibe availability onboard, but we have not checked (since we managed to get ours ahead of time). I know it was sold out on Day 2 when I had to visit Guest Services. Our Travel Agent and rumors say that more than half of Vibe access is sold onboard only, but those are not verifiable facts.

Thank you so much, very glad you enjoyed it!

Cheers, and thank you very much! We will share a few more videos about Norwegian Prima in the next few days. Still unpacking our digital luggage :)

CaptMike, our check in was at 1100. Checkin at the Port was very quick and efficient. In about 1130 we were on the ship. Our stateroom though was not ready until after 1500, which was not a problem, as we just stayed at the Vibe Beach Club area, enjoyed a few drinks and took it easy. A musterdrill was a non-event: we watched the video ahead of time and scanned our card at the drill station as we boarded the ship. All and all, solid 4(5) for the embarkation!

Cheers and thank you! We will share a ship walk through here shortly. Beautiful ship, good crowd!

EZ Cruise Parking maps.app.goo.gl/dvFw7xkhBxk41u768

Thank you so much! Have a fantastic vacation, and Happy New Year!

Thank you! I should have read the fine print on the daily info sheet! Still find it funny that I did not see any tax charges for the food we consumed in TX waters ;) don't give our state legislators or NCL any ideas! ;) We loved the food. Especially the Food Hall. It is crowded during peak hours, but we could always find a seat, especially if we were OK with barstool type of seating (worth mentioning that at barstool seats they limit menus to the specific food court venue you are at, such as Asian, Indian, Etc). Menu there does not rotate from day to day, but that was quite fine with us: we tried everything and were never disappointed. We ran into quite a few solo cruisers and seemed like they were having great time: one of the gatherings at the Belvedere Bar seemed to be impromptu (nothing was on the schedule), not sure if there is a Facebook page for solo cruisers or just a word of mouth. Enjoy your cruise, I'm sure you will have great time and hopefully NCL gets a few quirks with disembarkation worked out. It was rather poorly managed, but we did not take away any points for that: they are still working out Galveston nuances.

How long did you have to wait for the return of your wine bottles?

@@kimbrooks6023 Kim, thank you. Wine does not get back to the stateroom automagiically. We had to go to the service desk (twice or thrice) to get our bubbly back. We got it back on day 2.

Thank You!!

@@alex_irinaso if you got it back on day 2, were you able to enjoy the wine on the ship? Or did they somehow lock it so that you couldn’t?

Thank you, great suggestions!

Thank you and enjoy your cruise! We've heard that Virgin worked out a lot of glitches over the past year and overall experience got much better! Cheers!

When we booked, we did not even realize that closet was there :) To be perfectly honest, cabin is very spacious as it is, about 1.5 times bigger than a typical stateroom!

...and whenever MSC folk decides that we need more walking

That would be ShipLife J's channel I think :)

Thank you! Cheers!

Around Yachclub pool you can get a lounger any time of the day just about. We never had luck with main pools, they were always packed and had no shade whatsoever.

Thank you for sharing your experience! Very similar to what we observed. Quite unfortunate that in 2 months since our Inaugural Sailing things have not improved much (if at all). Glad that elevators moved in the right direction (pun intended), when we sailed, even butlers could not pull "access card magic". As for tipping, we sometime tipped in cash waiters and bar staff that did a good job, but that did not make any difference to the level of service to be perfectly honest. On Royal even before tipping service was fantastic 99% of the time...

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts! It is almost like we were on different ships! What you are describing is exactly what we missed! Towards the end of the cruise things got better but only because we had to adjust: we stopped going to YC restaurant and settled on Skyline or the main buffet. Also we just had to lower our expectations (not that they were super high to begin with). Oh well, we all have our favorite hotels and cruise lines, sadly MSC just did not align with us at all. Almost thinking about inside cabin on one of the "fun line" from Galveston to reset our expectations ;)

@@alex_irina I have had the same experiences while reading reviews, as well - so I “get it”…. Truly - I do… I wanted to respectfully comment on your (well done) video so that other folks would know that Yacht Club really is an amazing experience. Yes- there will always be speed bumps in travel (I have had some experiences at the Ritz Carlton Club Floors that were downright ICK!…and we basically never go there now - the R.O.I. for RC Club Floors is definitely not there for us), but MSC Yacht Club has a truly loyal / loving following - so I hope that one day, you will give it another shot and see if the ‘vibe’ gets better. We are looking forward to Seashore on NY’s Eve 2023 - but I will be doing some special requests for the YC restaurant for me, if the menu continues to be too ‘avant garde’ for my basic palette (no food with eyeballs, please! LOL!). …and my two cents - PLEASE AVOID ANY SUPER CHEAP, BUDGET CRUISES…. If you want a reset, at least do it in an inside or ocean view cabin on Celebrity or Royal :-)

​@@alex_irina hello, what was the date of your cruise?

@@s.n.e.8941 December 11, 2022

Thank you! I did not realize that.

Thank you!

Thank you much for taking time to watch and comment! Glad that your experience with MSC was more pleasant than ours. As we said in our interview to J @shiplife "we set our expectations too high". Yet our reasoning was very straight forward: when we pay what we paid for the balcony on the Wonder of the Seas that very year, we expect similar or better experience. That was not the case... Again, we sincerely glad you enjoyed your cruising experience and happy sailings! Cheers!

Thank you so much for your opinion. The best thing is that I can and will talk about things that I love and hate for as long as I wish. And will continue to do so. In our experience food and service in YC was much worth than elsewhere on MSC and MSC in general is much worth than any other company we cruised with. I'm not suggesting my opinion has to match yours.

Thank you much!

Thank you for your kind words. Not everyone agreed with us, but we did not expect everyone to have the same opinion. Simply wanted to share our impression of both Yacht Club and MSC in general. If we would have seen honest video like this earlier, our money would have gone to the Royal Caribbean group :) Russian is indeed a very difficult language. We are Americans, but happen to speak Russian. Cheers, happy cruising!

@@alex_irina We can only give what we have. :) It was a great video. I like Jay´s video very much because he´s very honest in his opinions, as his girlfriend Laurene. I am very grateful that you guys could show such honesty here.

Thank you so much!

I know and sorry about that. The original video was over 2 hours long, and someone had to make hard decisions he is still paying for :)

I totally agree! It made it hard to follow.

Thank you kindly! Wish we have connected on the cruise, but there is always next time, right? :) Cheers!

@@alex_irina Hi Alex, Yes! Most definitely it would be very fun to connect with you two.

There certainly is enough room on that balcony for 2 loungers and more! Why they were not there in the first place is a mystery. We never asked out Butler to get a lounger, did not even think of that... Hope you have a lovely cruise and hope they get coffee machines fixed by then! ;)

@@alex_irina Thanks for the reply. Just booked a second week in the same room turning our cruise into a B2B. Now I will definitely want one or two loungers out there. Funny (or not) about that coffee machine. I don't think they've ever worked right on our other cruises with MSC, Seaside and Meraviglia. I wonder if they'd be able to get me a tea kettle like RC does for their suite guests?

Disagree. They’re just giving honest feedback. Nothing wrong with that at all.

@@rob171081 I didn't say they were not giving their honest feedback. I just said they came across as snobby to me.

@@scottchace780 Not very snobby. You probably haven't seen Brits and their Canadian and Australian cousins.

:)

Thank you very much! And glad you had a great time! I would not say our cruise was ruined, but it certainly fell way short of our expectations (set proportionally to the price we paid for the suite in the Yacht Club). And as for experience: we tried all major lines (except Carnaval) and still looking for the ultimate line to commit to. So far nobody comes close to Royal (and their slightly more upscale branch Celerity).

@@alex_irina No, it was very obvious you and your wife knew what you were talking about. My wife and I are new to cruising so we respect and and all opinions…we are happy to have heard yours…its valuable! You two are good people, it’s obvious!

Thank you for your comments! The reason I compared MSC with the Oasis Class of RC is because they have a similar maximum passenger capacity (around 5,500). Oasis is bigger and heavier exactly because they went for more open spaces and it definitely made for a much better experience for us. We loved Wonder and if you are considering sailing on it, feel free to check out our review of that ship.

Thank you for clarifying and correcting us! Indeed we initially mixed it up. Fixed in the title now.

Thank you so much ❤

Thank you!

"Same old" Eastern Caribbean. Bahamas, Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. No matter ho much we complain here, it is still better than Dallas at -11C :)

Thank you! And I most certainly understand that most of my comments are not in the spirit of the season :) that being said, the video is not sponsored or even monetized, so this is our view of the first cruise that fell so short of our expectations, it is not even funny... There were a few folks on this cruise that enjoyed it and plenty who shared our view. Cheers and thanks again!

Right? He even found fault with the Bridge of Sighs. Not wide enough for him?

@@julierackow7545 I actually did not say a word about the "bridge of sighs", but thank you so much for contributing! Have to correct myself: I did comment on the size of the bridge. Not necessarily the width, just overall size. After being on the Oasis Class everything on MSC looked very small, compact, downsized. Comparison, by the way, is fair: Oasis Class and MSC Seaside Class have roughly same passenger capacity. MSC have chosen sardine approach while Royal went with Royal Promenade, Central Park and Boardwalk (not to mention unique and very functional top deck layout).