MSC Fantasia Recognized for its "Green Efforts"

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. (September 2, 2009) –MSC Cruises' commitment to the environment has been recognized with a prestigious 2009 Gold Magellan Award from Travel Weekly, a leading travel industry publication.

MSC Fantasia, one of MSC Cruises' newest and largest ships, was selected as the 2009 Gold Magellan Award Winner in the Cruise Ship|CO7: Eco-Friendly "Green" Cruise Ship category.

The Magellan Awards is the premier awards program honoring the best in the travel industry. The 2009 Magellan Awards received entries from top travel organizations and professionals worldwide.

"MSC Cruises is honored to have been selected a Magellan Award Winner. It recognizes our high standards and our ongoing commitment to ensuring our vessels are as environmentally friendly as possible," said Richard E. Sasso, president and CEO of MSC Cruises (USA), Inc.

MSC Fantasia is the first ship that has been awarded the prestigious Six Golden Pearls award by the international classification society Bureau Veritas. Six Golden Pearls is an integrated voluntary program that certifies corporate compliance with the three highest international standards in the areas of environment (ISO 14001), health and safety (OHSAS 18001) and food safety (ISO 22000). It includes an extra notation Cleanship 2 AWT, for the 3 domains "potential pollution": air, water, waste.

In addition, the ship also features the following environmentally friendly procedures:
* Recycling of waste water: An advanced water treatment system recycles and treats waste water according to the highest legal and ecological standards.
* Energy conservation: An energy saving system is installed an all the staterooms and public rooms, to automatically monitor electricity usage. This reduces fuel consumption and gas emissions that are harmful to the environment by powering down unused systems.
* Optimization of air-conditioned areas: Monitoring manages climate conditions in staterooms at all times, automatically intervening in any instance of wasteful overuse of air conditioning systems.
* Intersleek® 900: The hull of MSC Fantasia is painted with the new revolutionary paint "foul release" with fluor-polymers, a non-toxic substance which helps reduce CO² emissions through the reduction of fuel.

MSC Fantasia joined the fleet in 2008 and her sister ship, MSC Splendida, in July of this year; both have been built to the same high standards.