I Took The First Cruise Since The COVID Cruising Shutdown

yesterday i disembarked the msc virtuosa i was on board the first cruise to leave the uk in 14 months and i don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the entire world was looking at this cruise there were tv crews on board i was actually on tv on this cruise every newspaper was there there was a lot of pressure on msc to get this right if this cruise didn't go right it would set back the cruise industry months possibly even years so it had to go to plan i knew as soon as this cruise came out that i wanted to book the cruise and i wanted to book the first cruise from the uk but i have to say i have never been more nervous for a cruise i thought i had done my research i've been researching cruising for the last year but i didn't know if i personally would feel safe on the ship and if i would still find cruising with social distancing and masks if i would still find that fun i also thought the cruise ship may be a bit ghostly quiet it only had a thousand passengers on board and because everybody had all-inclusive drinks i didn't know if it might turn into a bit of a booze cruise msc are the only cruise line cruising from the uk this summer that don't require everybody to be vaccinated but if you're not fully vaccinated you have to do another covid test before you go to the cruise port and everybody does one at the cruise port the embarkation took around an hour and a half which i really don't think is too bad sometimes it can take you an hour to embark on a cruise anyway and considering all of these extra steps that they had to go to i think msc did a really good job with it when we got into the cruise port the first thing we did was we went to a desk where they just checked that you had the right travel insurance that you either had the proof of your vaccines or the proof of your tests and just checked that you were kind of on this cruise and you had your passports once we got through security it was time for the coveted test everybody who's two and older has to have a covered test and i made a mistake here i thought it would be the throat swab and the nose swab that's how i've always done covert tests i've done them at home before so when i went into the kind of little booth and the woman came at me with a swab i opened my mouth and actually was only the nose swab so i'm glad it was only the nose one but i was just there like which was quite funny when i do these tests at home i feel like i know where the top of my nose is and it felt like they shoved this swab up into my brain it made me cry it makes everybody cry but it was more than worth it to get on the cruise once we had done that we checked in we sat down we were given a boarding time and then we were allowed on the ship the cruiser i took was four nights long and it left southampton in england returned to southampton in england and it had one port stop in you guessed it england we visited portland in dorset but even if this cruise went nowhere i would have been on this cruise for me it was more about seeing all of the procedures seeing my friends eating and drinking rather than the actual destinations one of the great things about taking the first cruise is that nobody else has justice in box so your cabin is ready as soon as you get on the cruise ship i had booked the cheapest inside cabin in true emma fashion i'm definitely a budget cruiser i teach a course about how to cruise on a budget and true to my name i was cruising in the cheapest inside cabin right at the front of the ship they could not have put me further from the buffet if they tried but in hindsight i think that was probably a good thing the cabin had loads of plug sockets three usbs two us and two eu and the cabin's just very minimalistic it's one of my favorite cabin designs when you think the cruise ship cabins are clean it was a whole new level of clean our remote control for the tv had been cleaned and sanitized and it was in a little paper bag even the remote control had its own paper bag that's how sanitized and clean our cabin was i did have a couple of friends on board and we did that thing where you run around and you have a look at everybody's cabins they had a cabin that had bunk beds and a huge balcony so thank you to them for letting me have a look at that their youtube channel is called cruise boys make sure you subscribe to them it was interesting to see i'm always in an inside cabin so to see something like that it was a treat it was a treat for me one thing that's different now and i think it is so much better is the mustard drill so we've all been to master drills on cruises where everybody has to take their life jacket stand on the promenade deck everyone's shouting at each other and it's overwhelming and it's hot and you want to sit down that is a thing of the past no more will we have to do that on cruise ships on this cruise what you have to do is watch the usual safety videos that you've normally watched in muster drill you watch them in your cabin and then you went to your muster station just so that you know where it is and they scan your cruise card just to say that you came to that so you have all of the same pieces of the master drill everyone just does it in their cabin rather than all being together in one place everybody kind of did leave their cabins and go to their muster drill at the same time interestingly i never really bumped into anybody in the corridor on this cruise or really ever had any situations where i felt like people were too close to me on the stairs and things people tended to just you know just stay away from each other which i appreciated and knowing that everybody on that ship had had a negative coronavirus test just before they got on board i felt really safe with that a lot safer than i would just walking down the street at home we did go outside for the sail away and i did make the decision that i didn't want to bring a coat and i didn't want to bring an umbrella on this cruise because i thought if it's raining i'm just not going to get off the ship i've paid for this cruise it's been such a long time since we've been on the cruise i will just stay inside not thinking that i had agreed to do some filming with a tv crew and that they wanted me to go up on the top deck for the sail away the wind was blowing in my face but i did get my 15 or 10 seconds of fame i've heard that everybody gets 15 minutes of fame so maybe i've got 14 minutes and 50 seconds of fame left in hindsight maybe a coat nah i still don't think i would bring a coat even if even if i had the space nah i think that's a british thing we're so used to the rain we're so used to the wind bring it on i'm on a cruise i'm quite happy i did get some comments because when i was on tv at the sailor way i was wearing my mask so there are a lot of questions about where do you actually have to wear masks on the cruise and if you're on the top deck and you're away from other people you don't have to wear your mask but it was freezing it was absolutely freezing i don't know why you would go up there and take off your mask because it was just nice to have something to kind of keep you warm if you're up there and you're sitting on a sun lounger not that it was very sunny or you're walking around and you're away from other people you don't have to wear a mask the only time you really have to wear a mask is when you're kind of coming down the stairs or your places where other people are going to be and you can't social distance but if you want to find yourself a nice quiet corner lots of quiet corners on this cruise because it wasn't the weather for sunbathing you can sit there you don't have to get that kind of sun tan on your face don't worry about that the kind of masks hand you'll be fine when it came to mask wearing inside the cruise ship you have to wear a mask when you're walking down the stairs when you're walking to a bar if you get up from the table and you want to go to the toilet you have to put your mask on but when you're sat there with your friends and you're having a drink and you're in the restaurant you don't have to wear your mask and it's amazing just how used to that we are at the moment it didn't bother me at all it took nothing away from the crew's experience the only thing that was slightly annoying is when you know you're in the buffet you get up just to go and get another bread roll you just forget your mask and they will say to you oh can you just get your mask please oh sorry you get your mask and you carry on the buffet is definitely one of the places on board that was the most different but i'll talk about that in a second i have cruised with msc before this was my fourth msc cruise i've cruised twice before on the msc merivillia so i felt very very at home on this cruise ship as soon as i got on board one reason why i cruise with msc quite a lot is that the dress codes are very very casual it's a very chilled out cruise on this first night we went to the main dining room for dinner what they did in the main dining room is that they would just have certain tables that were just you know cordoned off and they just wouldn't sit people at those tables they didn't have all the restaurants open on this cruise because we didn't have enough passengers to fill all of the restaurants so only a couple of restaurants were open they actually did just anytime dining on this cruise which is a bit different for msc normally you have either early dining or late dining but i guess just because of reduced capacity numbers it was easy enough for everybody just to come and sit and eat whenever they wanted to and i did a lot of that on this cruise another thing that we've seen a lot of in the last year is this idea of having menus on your phone rather than physical menus at no point on this cruise did i have my hands on a menu because i didn't need to i went on my phone i scanned the qr code and you can see the bar menu the food menu whatever you need you can actually see the menus before you even get to the restaurant if you download the msc app you can click on every restaurant you can click on every menu and you can decide i don't really i don't really fancy that today i'm going to have this instead your britishism of the week is fancy that i don't think that people in the rest of the world say that but fancy that it kind of doesn't mean oh i fancy that person it means oh i fancy a bread roll just i want that i really feel like it really fancy a cup of tea i really fancy a cookie i really fancy a bread roll that's your britishism for the week and i really fancied a cruise before this and it was brilliant i did have a couple of people come up to me on this cruise and suggest britishisms which was really nice it was really nice to meet you guys i feel like this entire cruise is just the world's biggest britishism because it was for only british people we did quite often hear you know we'd be sat next to somebody who said oh i can't get the menu on my phone or it doesn't work you did have to connect to the wi-fi so that you have the connection with the ship but you don't have to pay for wi-fi i did buy a wi-fi package because i wanted to keep in contact with you guys but you don't have to pay in order to use their app and in order to see the menus if you're somebody who just doesn't want to do it on your phone you don't want to do it on your app that's fine you just say can i have a paper menu please and they will bring you a paper menu and then they'll throw it away at the end of the meal loads of people did that it was no problem you're not inconveniencing the staff it's your cruise if you want a paper menu just ask for one they have them all there already so it was pretty easy in that way but i really liked having it on my phone msc do sometimes get quite a bad rap on the internet when it comes to their food maybe sometimes deserved maybe sometimes not deserved but i have to say on this cruise i feel like msc really kind of upped their game there wasn't a single thing that i found on this entire cruise that was less than perfect everything was always the perfect temperature the portion sizes sometimes were pretty huge but apart from that it was good i can't find anything bad to say about any item of food and there was plenty of food i tested a lot of food on this cruise please just quickly check that you're still subscribed to this channel youtube has been deleting people that it thinks are robots and if you're watching this you're not a robot so just check that you're subscribed please one slight concern i had before this cruise was that i knew so many other people on this cruise i knew lots of cruise bloggers and youtubers and just friends from real life i knew a lot of you guys would be on the cruise and if i saw you i wanted to be able to sit with you in the pub or sit with you in the bar and talk to you i did worry a little bit that it would be kind of you must stay with your own cruise party but it was nothing like that if you want to sit down in a bar with a group of friends we spent a lot of time here in the champagne bar and in the pub and in the sky lounge that's completely fine whenever you went into a bar there would be certain chairs that had the do not sit here kind of marks on them most of the actual bars would have that so you can't be somebody who hangs out at the bar kind of talking to the bar men and making friends with other people but it still was pretty easy to make friends with people i would bump into people all the time who you know sat behind me or i'd walk past the pub and i would see people sat outside and it was really quite easy to make friends with people it didn't feel as though you had to kind of stay away from everybody it was still really friendly and everybody on board was really having a good time and happy happy to be on a cruise so that was nice when it came to the chairs that were kind of crossed off if you went to sit at a table and it had two chairs crossed off but you're a group of four like that's fine to sit on those chairs that have a mark on them the kind of idea of those chairs the do not sit here ones is that you keep space between your group so if you're in the theater they normally had kind of two seats and then i don't sit here two seats and they don't sit here if you're a group of three you can sit there as long as you have the don't sit here kind of next to you i hope that makes sense the idea is not to make you stay away from your you know if you're cruising with your children you don't have to make them sit over there you just want to keep space between your cruise party and other cruise parties that's the main thing no crew member is going to come up to you and say budge off that chair as long as there's still space between you and other people if there was like a big group of you and you really weren't social distancing the crew would come over and say guys budge over but you can still sit with your friends you can still have drinks for me one of my favorite things about cruising is just sitting in a lounge watching i watched dolphins at one point on this cruise but kind of just watching the ocean or sitting in the pub and watching people go by listening to live music and that lives on on cruises that's exactly the same as before the atmosphere is just as good if not better because everybody's so happy to be back on a cruise the msc virtuoso has this amazing central street with shops and restaurants in it it has huge water slides it has a ropes course and everything on board was open i will say that sometimes the timings were kind of limited so the water slides will be open for say an hour then they will be closed for cleaning and and sanitizing and then they might be open again later but everything was open if you're somebody who really wants to go on this cruise and you really want to do the ropes course it will be open as long as you make sure that you're there at the right time that may also be to do with the fact that we had very limited passengers on board it doesn't really make sense to have kind of the ropes course open all the time and nobody there but anything you want to do anything you did before if you want to go to the gym that's open not something i do but if you want to do that you can go to the gym the spa was open too it sounds as though the spa was kind of limited on this cruise but it was still open i don't know about you but for me the buffet is one of my most important places when i cruise and a year ago all of these news stories came out that said we'll never have cruise ship buffets again and it was all very very dramatic and i'm happy to report the buffet is still there the food is still fantastic and i think it's a better process than it was before all of this happened so when you go into an msc buffet there's loads of sinks and the crew will make sure you wash your hands they'll scan your temperature to check that you haven't got a higher temperature you'll walk to the start of the buffet they'll give you a tray give you a knife and fork and then you'll go round there's one-way systems in place which people actually tended to follow i've seen other cruises before that have one-way systems where everybody just goes everywhere but happy to report people mostly did follow the one-way system yeah maybe people are learning finally when you actually get to the buffet food everything is laid out in the same way as before so you may get to a place that has you know for me it's normally the bread rolls and the breadsticks and you just say to them oh can i have two of those white rolls please they'll put them on a plate hand them over the top and you will take them so you at no point touch all of the food you don't touch the tongs you don't touch the spoons you just request what you would like they put it on a plate and they hand it over to you just ate so much on this cruise i missed it i really missed cruise ship buffets even when you kind of went to get a drink they have the tea and the coffee and the water and the juices for breakfast when you go there's just somebody there and you say oh can i have an orange juice and a water please they get it for you and they just hand it to you so i think that's better i think it's nice you don't have to do anything for yourself anymore because there were one-way systems in place you couldn't go back out the way that you came in the buffet because they didn't want people to kind of cross over but it worked really well and there were crew everywhere directing you in the right direction the crew on board this cruise ship was so lovely and i had maybe forgotten how nice cruise ship crew are but generally speaking i think they're some of the nicest people in the world every time you walk down the corridor there's you know good morning hello how are you how's your cruise and i had forgotten about that i think in the last year so they were just happy to be there i had a couple of conversations with crew who said you know how nice it is to be back on board how nice it is to be on virtuoso such an exciting cruise ship so yeah that was really really nice to hear that they were as happy as we were being on this cruise during this cruise i got to do something that i've never done before on any cruise i got to go through the doors that say yacht club only and normally i just peer through there i can never get through but msc did give me a visitor's pass and i was able to explore the yacht club the york club is basically a ship within a ship it's a more premium area on the msc cruise ships and in there you have your own lounge you have your own restaurant you have your own pool deck and your own pool for me i'm very much a budget cruiser so i don't think that the yacht club really is for me but i totally understand why if you're somebody who has the money it was very very nice in there we had the most amazing dinner in there i think there were only eight of us eating dinner and there was probably eight or ten crew members there so we had brilliant service amazing food it was really nice for me to be able to go through those secret doors that i've never been in before and just have a look around i did feel like a kind of undercover spy but i had to spy on it for you guys so yeah when i cruise i normally go to the theater every single evening and the theater shows on msc are only around 35 minutes so you might as well go to the theater they're very very interesting shows you definitely won't be bored when you cruise on msc and you go to the theater every single singer and dancer and we even had roller skaters and magic on this cruise every single person was extremely talented i just don't know that i understand the overall theme when it comes to msc's theater shows but i was definitely entertained by it half an hour of your evening it's somewhere nice to go and sit and chill out i was a bit confused and i think msc could make it a bit clearer that you have to wear your mask when you're sat down and you're watching the show i would say quite a lot of people didn't do that because probably they thought it was the same as being in a bar or a restaurant i did on the first night i sat down and i took my mask off and then it came on the kind of overhead and said please keep your masks on everybody was social distance there were chairs that were closed off we all had a lot of space per person but i think there was just a bit of confusion about whether you had to wear your masks when you were sat down so if msc are watching this maybe just make that a bit clearer maybe one of the most exciting things and the biggest differences between the msc virtuosa and the other cruise ships in the class is that msc virtuoso has a robot bartender his name is rob and he will make you a drink for i've heard 18 pounds i have to say i'm not the type of person who will spend 18 pounds on having a robot make me a drink i more go for the free conversation with rob and i did have some good conversations with him he kind of chats away to himself he wiggles his arms he winks he scratches his head he's very very interesting to see i did see a lot of comments who said oh who would pay to have a robot make you a drink when you can get one for free because we had all-inclusive drinks and i have to say rob was constantly working during our cruise he was making drinks all the time you didn't have to pay rob to make you a drink to see rob make a drink because he was so busy it did say when i was on board that rob had made 1 800 drinks so he is a well practiced bartender and it was really interesting to kind of just walk by him and see him wiggling his arms or winking at you it's definitely an interesting addition from msc not something that i would spend my money on but plenty of other people do and it is good fun there are loads of things on this cruise ship that you can do for an extra cost that i didn't do because i just did everything that was included in the cruise fair they do have f1 simulators they do have a 4d cinema they do have vr they do have bowling they have so many things that cost a little bit extra and a lot of people did buy passes to do all of that stuff but i was just enjoying the free food and sitting and enjoying the free drinks with my friends most of the time so i didn't feel the need to be entertained i never was bored not for a second so i i didn't feel the need to do that but people do people love it on this cruise we had all-inclusive drinks included up to the price of 10 pounds and at no point did i see anything to be honest i just didn't look if there was drinks that were more expensive than 10 pounds i just wouldn't even read it so there were pages of cocktails for 10 pounds beers for 10 pounds beer tails in the pub which is kind of a beer cider cocktail they're under 10 pounds so i don't really know that you would ever need to upgrade some people you know they they like a specific high-end drink or they like champagne but for me personally i had more than enough to drink too much to drink probably just with the included drinks it was really nice to have the msc wristband because when you ordered a drink they would come around take order you just give them your wrist and that's how you pay you can't pay with your cruise card but the wristband was really kind of useful for that it also was tracking and tracing everybody who was on the cruise in case there was a coronavirus outbreak but i pretty much just used it to pay for cocktails throughout the cruise and it worked really well for that i spent a lot of time in the main dining room in the buffet of course and the yacht club but i did have one speciality meal in a place called induschin it was indonesian food and my goodness it was so much food i did it on the last lunch time because i got to the end i realized i hadn't done it i have matched my status with mse which means that i get a free speciality meal and you know me i'm not going to miss out on a free meal so i did it on the last lunch time with the cruise and my goodness every single course that came out could have been a main course i feel like i had three main courses in that restaurant and then i actually skipped dessert i skipped dessert and didn't eat for seven hours afterwards which for me on a cruise i normally eat every couple of hours but i was so unbelievably full we had amazing service in there we were one of the only people in there having lunch if you do match your loyalty status with msc and you get a free specialty meal what you do is the dining package which is kind of a you know a reduced menu which i think was supposed to cost 54 pounds and you just order everything from that special menu there are quite a few specialty restaurants on the msc virtuoso one that was very popular was a taco place what most people seem to do is buy a dining package before they went on the cruise which allowed them to have i think it was three specialty meals during the cruise you can just show up you can just book on board go to the speciality restaurants and pay kind of the prices that they are but i think if you're somebody who wants to do speciality dining you get a much better rate if you pre-book and you do a dining package rather than just paying as you go because you don't want to be looking at the prices of stuff when you're on a cruise you want to know that it's all kind of taken care of and you can just eat until you feel sick or maybe that's just me even though this was only a four night cruise we did have one stop so our itinerary went sea day portland in dorset and a c day and i stayed on board during that day because i didn't i i didn't really want to get off the cruise ship i've got to be honest with you the msc virtuoso is so much fun when you're doing excursions with msc this summer and almost every cruise line from the uk this summer you have to do organized excursions which meant i would have had to do an organized excursion in portland if i could have just got off and wandered around i might have done that and cruise lines definitely will do that into the future but for right now you have to do a cruise line organized excursion and i just thought i'll stay on the ship it was rainy it was drizzly i had all my food and my drink and this amazing ship to explore so i stayed on board i watched the cruise monkeys go on the ropes course i have been on the ropes course before and i think it's the type of thing where you know i got round i survived it i didn't fall off and i thought that's it i'm ahead i'm gonna stop that's it so i did i did that on another cruise and watched the cruise monkeys on this cruise go around the ropes course the cruise monkeys also went on the water slides which is something that i chickened out of it was so cold and i've done the cold water slide thing before on the merovillia i know what those slides are like so i left them to it if you're not subscribed to the cruise monkeys make sure you check out their channel i think they're going to have some very interesting videos from this cruise and you'll probably see me in various bars and their videos so check them out it was so nice to meet so many nice people on this cruise i think that's my overriding feeling was a lovely cruise with really nice people and that that's what makes the cruise the people you're on the cruise with the weather on this cruise was slightly rough when we started out so basically what we did was we sailed down to france and we just looped around and around and around in this place that was protected i guess from most of the wind when we got down there the sun came out and it was glorious and we went round and around and around for most of this cruise this cruise may be over but it's just the start for us returning to cruising to find out why i booked this cruise that you might not have thought that i would book check out this video 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Channel: Emma Cruises

Views: 243,618

Rating: 4.9277549 out of 5

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Id: tis8476FGqU

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021