Info Desk

At firs we had to put some money on the Costa Card at the Info Desk. No money is used on the boat. Instead everything is debited from the Costa Card account. We had changed most of our currency to dollars but euros was used on the boat so we lost 40 EUR because of the bad exchange rate. So we deposited 1500 dollars on the other Costa Card and assigned the other Costa Card to Visa.
Then we reserved a table for dinner on the first serving at 19:00 The Italian origin girl at the Info Desk was very arrogant and bored and was poorly acquainted with English language.
It was about 20 minutes to 15:00 when we got us organized and decided to have a quick bite of something to eat before the self service cafeteria was closed at 15:00 on the Harmonia (Hamburger) deck 9. Again a bad synchronizing of eating times, and again missing the lunch. We could have had a good lunch at the Hotel before leaving the room at noon and still made it to the customs at 18:00 and to dinner at 19:00, because the boat was NOT leaving until midnight.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to let some of the staff members participate on a Costa Cruise on some other Costa ship as “SPY”-passengers. Maybe they could get a better idea how it feels to be a passenger on the cruise. We are sure that they would come with lots of good new ideas how to develop the services.

The Tax Free Shop

There is a big Tax Free shop on deck 3. We did not buy anything from the shop because the buying was so difficult. It seems that the Italian origin shop clerks did not want to sell anything for English speaking passengers. One other reason, why the buying was so difficult, was that the shop was CLOSED from 11:00 to 17:00 when we would have had time to shop. One thing we can not understand why the shop selection included lots of Italian design articles, when most of the passengers where Italian so they could get the SAME stuff at home. Since the ship was built in Helsinki why not get a repertoire of Scandinavian design articles?

Cruise Hostess for English speaking passengers

A splended idea from Costa Cruises was to have an English speaking hostess Deborah Dalati on the ship. She belonged to the entertainment staff. She was keeping lectures about safety and how to fill the official documentation. We missed her great personality especially at the start of the excursions.

Cruising is a big industry and the ship is like a floating city (with a grew of 900). Navigating , Hotel service , Customer service, Eexcursions, Eentertainment functions are all performed by separate entities that know nothing of each other. The only ones who experience the whole picture are the passengers and Captain Giancarlo Cha.

It would be a great help to see the timelines of all functions on a single chart for the whole cruise. It would then be easier to see the time windows available for different events and tasks. The Tour office and the Tax free coud be open from 2 pm to 5 pm.. In the morning there is only a 15 minute timewindow to reserve an excursion after breakfast and before excursion meeting.

The Lifts

We used the lifts only 2 times during the cruise and maybe thanks to this we did not gain so much weight. There was 3 lifts side by side so that you could not see the other lifts coming if you where standing in front of one lift. Inside a lift there was an announcement in Italian that the doors where opening, but you could not hear this from the outside when you where waiting for another lift. From the outside you could hear again in Italian from the departing other lift, an announcement that the doors where closing, but then it was already too late to make it to that other lift.

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Last updated: 14.12.2018
Markku Tiuri
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