It seems most of the reviews on this site are from couples, and not very many Americans on Costa. So I thought I would post our impressions and some thoughts in particular regarding kids. Spoiler alert: we loved it! But I can see that Costa might not be for everyone.

My family (me, my wife and two girls aged 11 and 13) went on a one week cruise on the Costa Diadema sailing form Savona on April 8. Basically a different port every day, with only one sea day. I was trying to expose my kids to as many places as possible within our time constraints. While we succeeded in seeing a lot, we may have overdone it, as we were rushing around the whole week.

Timing. Our cruise was scheduled around my kid’s spring break from school. This seemed like a great idea to me. I thought it would be less crowded than the summer. I’m not sure it was. Our spring break coincided with Easter week, so there were tons of people everywhere but especially in the Vatican and other cathedrals in Italy. We were at the Vatican the day before Good Friday. At our school, if Easter comes particularly early or late, they will not schedule spring break around it. If you have a situation like that, I would say go for it on spring break. I would not recommend the Vatican during Easter Week. Our kids break was only one week. We flew out of San Francisco on Thursday night and returned a week and a half later on Monday afternoon. Kids had to miss two school days and were actually not happy about that – they are serious students and didn’t want to miss any school, so we tried to minimize it. It was really a lot ground to cover in that time. If we do it again I think we will try the summer. Read more