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Should YOU Take a CRUISE? One week in the CARIBBEAN

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A four-year backpacker just spent a week on a 5,000-passenger mega-ship, and it wrecked his assumptions about cruising.

Christian LeBlanc — better known to his subscribers as Lost LeBlanc — has spent nearly four years living out of a backpack, moving country to country on his own schedule. So when he and his partner Katy boarded the MSC Seaside out of PortMiami for a seven-day Caribbean run, he went in expecting to hate it. Instead, in his video “Should YOU Take a CRUISE? One week in the CARIBBEAN,” he documents a trip that upended most of what he thought he knew about large-ship cruising.

• LeBlanc and Katy sailed roundtrip from PortMiami aboard the 153,516-gross-ton MSC Seaside, a ship that carries over 5,000 passengers.
• The itinerary hit three ports in a week — Philipsburg in Sint Maarten, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and Nassau in the Bahamas — giving the couple four countries total in seven days.
• They traveled inside the MSC Yacht Club, the ship’s gated luxury section with its own lounges, private dining, and priority service, rather than in the main passenger areas.

A Backpacker’s Skepticism Meets a Mega-Ship

LeBlanc’s travel identity has been built on independence — solo routes, local buses, no set schedule. A mega-ship carrying more than 5,000 people is close to the opposite of that model, and he says as much going into the trip. The MSC Seaside’s scale alone makes the case: at 153,516 gross tons, it’s built less like a traditional liner and more like a floating resort, with a low-deck Waterfront Boardwalk running along the water, glass skywalks, and panoramic aft elevators that face outward over the ocean instead of into an internal atrium.

That outward-facing design is deliberate on MSC’s part, and it’s the detail LeBlanc keeps returning to — the ship doesn’t feel like it’s hiding the sea from you, which matters to someone whose entire travel style is built around being outside and moving.

Inside the MSC Yacht Club

Rather than sail in general accommodations, the couple booked into the MSC Yacht Club, the line’s “ship-within-a-ship” enclave that comes with its own dedicated lounge, private dining room, and priority service for boarding, tenders, and dining reservations. It’s the kind of arrangement designed to insulate paying guests from the crowd logistics of a 5,000-passenger vessel — no lines, no waiting for a table, a separate check-in.

For two people used to hostels and overnight buses, the contrast is the point of the segment: the Yacht Club is essentially a boutique hotel operating inside a mega-ship, and LeBlanc treats it as the clearest test of whether high-end cruising can actually deliver on its promises.

Four Countries, One Suitcase

The itinerary took the Seaside from PortMiami to Philipsburg in Sint Maarten, then to San Juan in Puerto Rico, and on to Nassau in the Bahamas before returning to Miami — three stops, four nations, one boarding pass. LeBlanc frames this as the cruise industry’s core sales pitch: unpack once, then wake up in a new country almost every morning. Onshore, the days are filled with the expected mix of beach time, historic forts, and port towns to wander, while the ship itself becomes the connective tissue between stops.

They “were not ready to leave” — the verdict LeBlanc and Katy landed on after a week they expected to tolerate, not enjoy.

The Trade-Offs of Mass Tourism

LeBlanc doesn’t pretend the format is flawless. Port days are short and tightly scheduled, leaving little room for the kind of unplanned wandering that defines his usual travel — the same tension he explored while walking 2,650 miles with a single backpack. A cruise stop in Nassau or San Juan is curated by design, built around a return time to the ship rather than an open-ended day. For viewers who’ve followed his channel’s usual independent-travel content, that’s the real question the video is answering: can a boxed-in, mass-tourism format still deliver something worth the trade-off. His answer, after watching efficiency and hospitality do the heavy lifting all week, leans toward yes — a conclusion that lines up with what other creators have found packing an entire itinerary into a 7-day Caribbean cruise.

MSC’s fleet has leaned into that same efficiency argument elsewhere, from the Seaside’s Yacht Club setup down to the line’s much longer sailings, like the round-the-world itinerary covered in the 119-day MSC Magnifica world cruise — proof the line is selling the same pitch at very different scales.

By the end of the week, LeBlanc’s skepticism hadn’t just softened — it had flipped. Four countries, one suitcase, and a Yacht Club balcony turned out to be enough to make a four-year backpacker not want to disembark in Miami.