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My husband and I are seasoned cruises, however this was our first experience with Costa on the Costa Classica and it will definitely be our last. In comparison to other cruise lines this cruise did not measure up in terms of service, food or the ship. The only redeeming element of the cruise was we visited some fantastic destinations.
The ship: was really tired, out of date and definitely in need of refurbishment, our cabin like many others was in need of new decor and soft furnishings, however the size of the cabin was really good.
Ship TV: was an absolute joke and this is being kind, there were 7 films available to watch which initially sounds a lot, but the problem was 1 film per day played on a loop all day, the films in week 1 were then repeated in the same way throughout week 2. I have never experienced this on any other cruise.
The food: well again unlike any other cruise line we had during the first 2 days 3 dinning options available to us, the pre booked formal restaurant, the self service restaurant and a pizza place that was open from 9pm to 1am. However, after the first couple of days the self service option was closed on an evening leaving only the formal and pizza option available. The food in the formal dining room was appalling, every evening we had 5 courses consisting of a starter, soup, pasta, main, and sweet. Sounds good doesn't it? But it definitely wasn't, the food during week 1 was marginally better than week 2, but every soup we had tasted the same and really had no taste at all, pasta was hit and miss, and at times swimming in oil, this rendered it uneatable. The main courses were often either not cooked enough and therefore tough, or overcooked and dry, but the worse was being served overcooked frozen, deep fried food which was absolutely disgusting and unacceptable. By the time we left the main course we didn't wait around for sweet because it probably wasn't worth it, it took too long to serve our table and we couldn't be bothered anymore. I have never been served frozen food which has been deep fried and burnt to add insult to injury. We both lost weight during this cruise and certainly didn't over eat.
The food in self service during the day: breakfast wasn't worth getting up for, so we didn't bother most days, lunch: poor choice, practically no salad bar, in fact this consisted of lettuce 2 types, tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, so you can see why this was a shock and why we considered it to be beyond poor. Thank god for the afternoon tea, which we don't normally have, but this was the best thing available on board. If we hadn't eaten this then we wouldn't have eaten much at all.
Service in the formal restaurant was really slow and often our dinner took 1.5 hrs to serve, during which time you were extremely lucky if you could get a drinks refill, therefore all our table started going to the bar before dinner and taking our drinks in with us to ensure we had a drink with our meal.
Although all of this was really bad we had a fab holiday because of the people we met on board, but we will never go with Costa again and we wouldn't recommend Costa to anyone.
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