Meraviglia in Costa Maya

Apparently booking a bunch of cabins with extended family and cruising together over Thanksgiving is a big thing with a lot of people. We’ve had cruises that started or ended just before or after Thanksgiving before, but this was the first one that actually fell on the holiday. The ship was at or near capacity so everything was crowded. There were lots of large family groups. About a quarter of the passengers were children. Booking the next cruise after the Thanksgiving one might be a good way to avoid crowds though. Our 11-day cruise on MSC Meraviglia turned out to be a 7-day Thanksgiving cruise with a 4-day back-to-back cruise tagged on at the end, though we had booked it as one cruise. The 4-day bit at the end had less than a quarter of the number of people with only about 1000 passengers onboard. The shorter length of that cruise might have been part of it, but also being just after the holiday made it a less-popular time for a lot of people. Previous cruises we’ve taken just before or after the holiday were not that crowded either.

turkey on Carnival Breeze

We had one memorable Thanksgiving spent in a hotel in Miami between cruises, but had never actually been on a ship for Thanksgiving before our cruise on the MSC Meraviglia. The Thanksgiving spent in a Miami hotel is memorable not just for being between cruises, but also because there had been a big storm and there was no internet within a wide swath of the hotel. We had to walk a mile or so to a Burger King or McDonalds to have internet access during the few days we were there. On Thanksgiving everything was closed so our Thanksgiving dinner that year consisted of microwave macaroni & cheese in our hotel room. There hadn’t been any Thanksgiving decorations on the Carnival ship we’d just got off of during our sailing, but as we were leaving the port we saw they had just put up a giant blow-up turkey for the next cruise.

turkey dinner

We weren’t sure if there would be anything special for Thanksgiving on the Meraviglia since MSC is not an American cruise line, but turkey was indeed on the menu that day and they had a formal night in honor of the holiday as well.

Costa Maya snorkel boat

We had a port stop in Costa Maya, Mexico on Thanksgiving, and spent the morning snorkeling. At lunchtime we found the crew had put up a fancy display with watermelon and other fruit carvings, napkins folded to look like flowers, and a Happy Thanksgiving cake at the entrance to the buffet.

cake and fruit carvings at the buffet

The crew did put up a lot of decorations around the ship while everyone was out in port for the day, but the decorations mainly consisted of Christmas trees in various places around the ship.

cake at the dining room

There was a Thanksgiving cake at the entry to the dining room at dinner time, which looked a lot like the one up at the buffet, but with a neater job done on the frosting and without the carved fruit or fancy folded napkins. Special happenings for the day included a kid’s Thanksgiving parade and music in one of the lounges labeled as music for a Thanksgiving celebration. We did not attend either of those events. The dinner tables were set up fancy with napkins folded to resemble turkeys.

dining table set-up on Thanksgiving

The main thing that would make a Thanksgiving cruise special would be getting together with family for all the folks that made that sailing in large family groups. The dining room was more crowded that night than any other night of the cruise, with all the tables filled rather than many empty ones as most nights when a lot of people chose to eat elsewhere. Some of the tables that are usually slightly separated into a line of tables for 2 or 4 were pushed together into one long table to accommodate large family groups.

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