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Mediterranean Shipping Cruises

SS Melody

Your Rating:
Reviewed by: Jan van Holland
# previous cruises: 7
Date of Trip: April 29, 2001
Itinerary: Mediterranean

MSC's Melody is a big, stable ship that, because of stabilizers, can handle all sorts of weather. Some parts of the Mediterranean sometimes can be a bit rough, but at this ship nobody gets seasick! Ideal shape and weight. Not so ugly and inconvenient as the big American cruise-ships like Carnivals and RCI's. This ship has character. The crew is very nice and really wants to help you with everything you can imagine! The best experience on water: Cruising the Italian way!

The biggest part of areas in the Melody recently have been renewed. Especially the Junkanoo Lounge has been changed in her advantage: ugly brown seats (as they were at my previous cruise aboard Melody) have been changed in beautiful pink.Very luxurious look, in almost every area. Except the gym-room: this is quite poor. The best outside-part on board is the part of the deck just above the bridge: you have a magnificent view from here->'Titanic-feelings'. The pools were refilled with clean (sea)water every day, so that's very hygienic. Very nice indonesian crew members: they have to work 15 HOURS a day for a minimum salary (a few dollars, unbelievable) they want to let feel everybody happy while THEY are the most unluckiest, under paid people on board. (and then there are people who don't pay tips, or just a few dollars, especially Americans. UNBELIEVABLE)

Quite good food. Not super, but nice. At a scale from 1 to 10, I would give the food (huge lobster,super-pasta!) a rank of 7.5 .

Cabins : I had a suite, the biggest one on board. So I can't judge about middle/lower deck suites. I bet they are from a outstanding quality (just like my suite of course) Nice view.

Poor. That's the only word I can say about it. Only the MarioMartinez-band was from a outstanding quality.

Excursions are possible in every port of call. Melody visited Naples, Palermo, Tunis, Palma de Mallorca, Barcelona (beautiful), and Marseille. We (dis)embarked at Genova.

There were some friendly Italian and Spanish people: many of them have a warm heart. But there were also a group of always drunken, agressive, fighting Germans on board. What I have seen is unbelievable. Fighting for food like hungry wolves, or for a chair at the pool deck... When you've got people from Germany on board, in most cases you have very, very bad luck.