MV DISCOVERY: Feedback?
 

We are looking at a looooong cruise on this ship in 2007 (Grand Pacific/Galapagos/Panama Canal). Has anyone cruised on this line or ship? Any feedback?

and, yes, I've spent the last four hours surfing the web looking for reviews and have found a total of five - none of them recent.

Sandyfrom Texas did you find anything? My parents are thinking about the Panama etc tour for 2007 as well and are looking to me for a little research help and I am also not finding much!

A review from 12/05 (tho perhaps not your itinerary), and found with two clicks in four minutes - not hours. LOL.

http://www.cruisecritic.com/memberre...?EntryID=16292

Cruisecritic.com is an outstanding resource for anyone considering cruising on any line. Good luck!

What is the ship? The Grand Pacific? Never heard of it - what's the line? I've been to the Galapagos two times and through the Canal three times - the last time on a small ship which was able to spend the night in Gatun lake and visit and island (previously a mountain) in the lake the next day. Going though the Canal was much more intersting on a small ship than the medium/large one I usually travel (though that was also spectacular).

Now I see, it's the MV Discovery - same other questions including: the size of the ship. I might be able to give you feed back on the itenerary, too.
Rona

Thanks tuckerdc - that review was posted in March of 2006 (about a 2005 trip) after I posted my question here. It is one of the more informative reviews of this ship. I did say that I found five (a couple of cruise critic, I think)but just not a lot of information. I've given up on that itinerary anyway and am looking at other trips right now. Thank you everyone who replied!

We went on the MV Discovery during 2007, the cruise was The Grand Voyage of Discovery, started at Tahiti, visited a few Pacific islands, over to South America including Galapagos, through the canal, Cuba, Azores and onto UK. We found that most of the shore tours had already been booked by the time that we boarded, there was absolutely nothing left for Galapagos so we had five days walking up and down the kilometre or so of the port town. Most of the ports were serviced by ships tenders, these being the life boats, most uncomfortable and had a strong smell of diesel. The brochures rave about the friendliness of the Filipino crew but with a few exceptions we found most of them surly and uncaring. The best was our cabin attendant, Richard, who was excellent. Most of the passengers were elderly and had cruised with them many times; when on board the line offers very generous discounts to returning passengers for future cruises, this is how they seem to fill them and why there are hardly ever any shore excursions left for new passengers. The food and entertainment was OK for the first week or so but after that it was the same thing repeated over and over again, eventually the savouries and the desserts seemed to taste the same. Hygiene left a lot to be desired on the upper deck self service area, the cups had lipstick and drink stains on them, eventually after many complaints the waiters were wiping them with a rather dirty cloth and filthy water from a bucket, we scalded all of ours before using them. A wifi internet connection was advertised, it was very expensive and took more than ten minutes to load a single page, I found they had a cable connection but they didn't have any cables, took me a couple of weeks at shore stops to find one (ethernet) but when used the Internet connection had an acceptable speed. We had prepaid gratuities for everyone but the Purser's office had no record of it, this still hasn't been resolved even though it was more than a year ago. We will never travel on old small ships again, previous cruises have been on at least four star ships with at least 2000 passengers, that is all that we will do in future.