The Drink Packages

Drink packages are sold and a logistic miracle is keeping track of the bottle count. Every time you get a zero priced receipt to sign. If You looked hard enough You could see the number of the remaining bottles on the receipt The meaning is to save a few Euros if you can forecast your consumption in forehand. Unfortunately the Beer package consisted of 20 bottles which we never managed to finish in a week. After spending thousands of euros to come on this cruise it does not make any sense to try to save some 20 euros. Consuming the drink package feels like work. You wind up drinking more than you really want to when you do not want to loose the 3 last free bottles.

The Evening Shows

Every evening there was a show in the Osiris Theatre after dinner. Every show was better than the previous one. The same artists performed, but it was always a different story and costumes. Some of the artist where exceptionally talented both to sing and dance. There was also a one man circus show by a multitalented man. One could honestly say that the shows where world class entertainment.

One evening there was a show where all the performers where members of the ships own grew. At the end of the show they came to receive their applauses in their usual working clothes and went back to work.

The Excursions

There was a selection of excursions to attend to at each port of call. Usually the get together for the excursions was 30 minutes after the ship reached the port. We had in good faith used 2 months to choose the excursions of interest in forehand from the Web. The excursion tickets are reserved from the excursion counter that is CLOSED from 11:00 to 17:00 There is only 1 hour time window after breakfast or before dinner and a huge row of passengers at the counter aiming to reserve an excursion ticket for next day. The touch screen computer aided excursion reserving machines where broken. We never found the reserving system from the TV with the remote.

There is something terribly wrong with the logistics and organising of the guests to an excursion. The guests do not know how to stand in a row or have forgotten how they used to do it in school. The excursion managers are waving their hands and speaking in tiny voices to get the guests to understand what they are trying to achieve. The English speaking guests do not have a clue what is going on. Finally somehow different number tags are clued to excursion guests chests, according to the selected excursion and language and the managers start leading the different groups to the waiting busses. The only way to find the busses is to follow where most of the guests are going, because the managers vanish at this stage. You are compelled to ask for the right bus when you get to them.

We suggest that Costa Cruises gets the same kind of ribbon corals that are used in the airports where guest going to excursions destined to different places and guided in different languages know right away witch line to take. Perhaps the attendees would get a card (stating destination and language) that is collected at the bus to keep count that everyone is on board.

If they would have told us in forehand that we had picked such an exotic excursion guided in such an exotic language as English that only a “MIXED excursion” (Italian/English 80/20) or (French/English 95/5) was possible we would have accepted that, but with a reasonable reduction in price.

There was altogether 49 brave ones from Finland (Aurinkomatkat) on the Cruise. We think everyone would have gladly paid a 100 EUR more for the Cruise if we would have had an own Guide from Finland.

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Last updated: 14.12.2018
Markku Tiuri
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