MSC Seascape Cruise - August, 2024

 

          In 2023, my wife and I had tickets to a concert at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, FL.  The concert was in mid-September and since the Brightline high-speed train was scheduled to begin service from Orlando on September 7th, we decided to drive over to Orlando from our house in the Tampa Bay area and then take the train down to Ft. Lauderdale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

          On August 30 2023, we received an email from Brightline informing us that due to delays, all rides from 9/7 through 9/21 were cancelled.  They refunded our tickets and gave us a voucher for two free Premium tickets good through August 31st, 2024.

 

          We ended up driving to our concert and banking the voucher for a future trip.  Which leads us to this cruise.  Since we live in Florida and have easy access to several ports, we don’t normally like to take cruises during the busy summer season when schools are out.  But we already had a big trip to the Galapagos planned for earlier in the year, and since the train voucher was about to expire, we picked a 7-day cruise from Miami on the MSC Seascape to the Eastern Caribbean.

          As a bit of background, we were fairly regular cruisers on Royal Caribbean until we aged out of rock walls, surf simulators and bumper cars.  We thought we had found our new home on Celebrity, but after the pandemic they made the decision to significantly raise prices while simultaneously cutting quality across the board, so we opted to branch out to other lines to try them out.  We sailed on Virgin Voyages in December of 2023, and now after reading several accounts of people raving about MSC Yacht Club, we booked this cruise.

          Some info about the Yacht Club:

          Here's a blurb from MSC's website about the ship:

          MSC also offers a status match for their Voyagers Club loyalty program.  I did a bit of research online and found that while my Diamond status with Royal Caribbean only matched with Gold on MSC, my Hilton Honors Diamond matched to MSC Diamond, which at the time was the highest tier (they have since added a new Blue Diamond level):

          I’ll start this review by documenting our experience aboard the Brightline train as well as our hotels in Orlando and Miami.  If you don’t care about any of that, skip ahead to Day 3.  😊

 

Day 1 – Travel to Orlando

Thursday, August 1

 

          We chose to drive over to Orlando after work on Thursday and get a hotel room near the airport (where the Brightline station is located).  Under perfect circumstances, this is only about an hour and half drive.  However, when dealing with I-4 traffic between Tampa and Orlando, all bets are off!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        We dropped off the dogs and hit the road about 4PM in an effort to try to get ahead of rush-hour congestion.  We made it across the bay and onto I-4, and then traffic was down to 25 MPH for long stretches of the drive.  And just like that, our 1.5 hour travel became over 3 hours.

          I'm really hoping they'll extend Brightline from Orlando to Tampa sometime in the near future, because delays like this are, unfortunately, more common than not between the two cities.

          Finally, around 7:30PM, we made it to our hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn Orlando Airport.

          We picked this hotel because it's fairly new, doesn't charge for parking and is only a few minutes from the Brightline station parking.

 

Final step count for Day 1: