The Indians have a saying that "it is not the wind, rain and storms that destroyed the giant redwood tree, it is the termites." CostaMediterranea has a lot of termites.

After a grueling 5 day tour of Italy with Your Man Tours we arrived at the Port of Savona at 1 o clock in the afternoon, our scheduled departure time. There was apparently a security watch by the Italian police at the port and we were kept waiting three and a half hours before being allowed onto the boat. I must say at the onset that we found the waiters, cleaning staff and crew to be very friendly and helpful - especially our cabin steward Byron.

We have traveled 6 cruises including the Grand Princess, Holland American and Crystal Cruises. I would rate these cruise lines at a 7.5 to 8.5 for overall service compared to a 4.5 to 5 for the CostaMediterranea. You would think that a multilingual cruise like Costa would take great pains to overcome the language barrier when it came to entertainment - no such luck. It was understandable that a ship with the multilingual passenger list should do all ship board announcements in 5 languages. The problem however was that although almost half of the passengers were English speaking, the English language movie channels available for the first ten days of the cruise were limited to the BBC World News. Read more