Here’s What It’s Like To Spend The Holidays On An MSC Cruise Ship

31.12.2023 - 18:55 / forbes.com

After spending Christmas on MSC Euribia, I’m convinced there’s no better place to celebrate the holiday season than on a cruise ship. In fact, I’m thinking MSC may secretly stand for Merry Sailing Christmas because it even managed to snag Santa, who was handing out gifts and looking like he’d had a grand old time at the buffet.

Whether your idea of Christmas is 1) a traditional one with family, 2) a movie and Chinese food or 3) something you’d rather not think about, this cruise has plenty to please everyone. You can get into the actual holiday spirit as much or as little as you want to but, honestly, it’s impossible not to smile when you’re surrounded by beautiful decorations and happy people.

On our cruise, there were families dressed in matching Christmas sweaters, couples who didn’t need mistletoe to display their affection, friends toasting each other and solo travelers participating in the many available activities or just relaxing with a drink. Because MSC is a European-based cruise line, there were guests from a variety of different countries and it was fun to talk to people and learn about their own holiday traditions.

Imagine celebrating the holidays without having to prepare food, decorations, anything! And imagine not having to clean up afterwards. Those are just a few of the perks of a Christmas cruise.

Here are some more reasons why you should consider booking a cruise for Christmas 2024 now:

My husband and I are huge fans of the European Christmas markets and we chose MSC’s 7 night Northern Europe itinerary so we’d get to experience them in a few different countries. A cruise really is the ideal way to do this and we especially enjoyed the markets in The Hague and Ghent, where we feasted on bratwurst and gluhwein and bought hand-crafted souvenirs from local artisans. These would be perfect places to do a little last minute shopping if you didn’t want to pack all your gifts.

A great feature of this particular itinerary is that it sails the same route every week so you can do a round trip from any of the ports, then extend your trip a few days on either/both ends to visit more markets. We really wanted to spend time in Bruges but, since the week we needed was sold out, we opted to do Rotterdam to Rotterdam and booked a car service to take us to Bruges, which is an easy two hour drive. We flew into Amsterdam and could have stayed there overnight but decided instead to take a car service directly to Rotterdam since we had never been there before. It was easy and comfortable and we got to do and see a lot more than just the markets.

Our only disappointment was that the Hamburg Christmas market – which we had really been looking forward to – was already closed for the season. This is