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FABULOUS DEAL TRANSATLANTIC MARCH 19 TO APRIL 3RD. 2023

Colon (Cristobal)

Several years ago I had a fabulous cruise with Costa (a few wrong things for me) but fabulous.  I had not heard from them for ages and suddenly I got this offer and it was amazing.  I was not even thinking of cruises at the time.  It began in La Romana and ended in Sevona Italy....7 fabulous stops...though I only got off once where the town was right in front of the ship.  I have mobility problems and can't deal with docking in some container yard and taking a bus to the town. 

This is an older ship but there is NO ship at sea as clean and polished almost to the obcessive!  I was so impressed,  The quality of the decor features, while not my taste were "TOP OF THE LINE QUALITY" .  The staff were totally amazing and really went the extra mile to look after my mobility.  They changed my assisgned Dining Room so it would be easier for me to get to...what a great team I had. While the base price was as low as it gets you did have to buy a drinks package as you don't even get a bottle of water to take a pill in your stateroom.  I also had to buy a WiFi package to keep in touch with e-mails...they were extremely helpful setting it up. WARNING this ship has gone HIGH TECH ... the menues photo's, everything requires a smart phone of tablet or a 12 year old to access.  The ship was mostly elderly people not a bit interested in gadgets. I was so glad to set things up on my tablet.  On the Lido there is a fabulous burger bar...small charge...there is also a fabulous Pizza bar...small charge but both the best food on the ship.  Sadly the great Italian quizine of my previous Costa cruise is no more.  They have three Food Stylists and all courses are very small....good for me, but they are much more about the look than the taste...BLAND EVERYTHING....on an Italian Ship?  Sorry, soup was good but I wanted to get off at ports and buy them a selection of spices...I don't think they everheard of Oregano.  Pity....and when things were familiar they were not very tasty. My stateroom hit all the marks for design...FUNCTIONALITY, FUNTIONALITY, FUNCTIONALITY.  Everything served its purpose for use .... Glam design came second.  I am Canadian (English) and sadlyat 85 I enjoy an stop in my cabin to watch a film and relax but other than NEWS which I was escaping, nothing was in English.  Today its all about cleanliness, sanitation etc. and this ship was high above standard until a lot of kids came aboard at France and they were in the hot tubs swimming under water, filling their mouths with chemical water and God only knows what else and spitting it at each other. The parents didn't give a damn.  Crew not allowed to say anything to them.  They could all end up very sick especially when adults would spend hours in the tub drinking cocktails and never leaving to go to the washroom.  

I think this ship is great at any price and there are a few things they need to spend money on to improve it.  HIRE a SOUND TECHNICTIAN who doesn't think maximum volumn is talent.  Often the music drowned out the singers.  The Mix was dreadful and blasting in every venue and you could...in places hear more than one venue at a time. Turn it down guys is a cruise ship, not a Rock Concert.  I'm deaf in one ear and need an aid in the other but but had to remove it as it was buzzing from the blasting sound systems...everywhere.  "Volumn does not mean talent"  I was in te professional theatre all mylife and believe me....this is so unnessary....it doesn't cost anything to just turn it down in degrees until its blended and still all its meant to be...at times you had no idea if the performers could really sing or not....so much reverberation.

Anyway....I managed to have a great time....great Wiskey Bananna Coloda....For transatlantic I never pay the extra for a balcony I wouldn't use so I had a picture window and a fabulous vew, staff and full size bed....some ships are reducing the size of beds to fit smaller spaces.  The high tech photes were taken by great people with talent to make sure you looked your best but I got a high pressure salesman who was pressuring me to buy 500 Euros of pictures.  I bought three...the most expensive at sea...25 Euros each and never when back to see anymore because I didn't want to be pressured into spending money for pictures I didn't like. This needs fixing. Sound needs fixing and I have an idea....Why doesn't Cosa Cruises try serving classic Italian food....it always tastes good and doesn't have to look like a Christmas Ornament. 

Thanks, Costa...

Our 3 main reasons for choosing a cruise were: 1) Relaxation, 2) good food, and 3) experiencing foreign cultures. Unfortunately we did't get any of it!

Ad 1), The moment we entered the ship we found out that hundreds of young people were on board as well, and they had brought their own music, which they played loudly and constantly, especially around the pool-areas, so if you were more than 25 years old you'd have to go somewhere else. The noise continued into the evening and night when they entered the hallways, corridors and even pulled mattresses out on the balconies where they sang and shouted until the early morning. We had 3-4 hours sleep every night and after a few days we walked around like zombies and just waited for the trip to be over.

Ad 2) The food was absolutely appalling! Breakfast were 3 kinds of cold egg-dishes with burned bacon and some old bread you could hardly chew - unless you washed it down with a thin, tasteless substance they called coffee or various juices, which had never been even close to a fruit. Lunch and afternoon tea were third-rate cafeterias, and dinner was the worst we've ever tasted. Soup, fish, meat, pasta - you name it - were cold and inedible, so in stead of gaining several pounds, which we normally do on vacations, we lost them!

Ad 3) We had really looked forward to strolling around the sea ports, enjoying the local buildings and atmospere, but every time we arrived at a port, a security advice was put outside our cabin door, on which we were warned (and I quote): Not to wear watches, sunglasses, and jewelry. Not to change money unless it was inside a certain bank. Not to carry any id, unless it was a photo copy. And in the event of robbery we should not offer any resistance (unqoute).  It left us with 2 options: Either stay on board the ship the whole time or pay a lot of money for Costa Pacifica's expensive tours.

Needless to say, it has been a nightmare of a trip, and we can highly recommend not to book a travel with Costa Cruises.

A waste of time and money

Before the cruise I read a lot critical reviews about Costa but I just thought that Americans are to demanding and as an European I can manage with European customers and service. I was totally wrong. We have cruised before e.g. Princess Cruises and have loved every second. This time was different. 

Ok, I have to admit that the ship seemed quite nice and cabin was also proper and clean. For first hour I was satisfied with my choise. Then it began: 

We did not get our luggage to our cabin until around 6:45 pm and were late few minutes from dinner (7:00) even though we changed our clothes in a hurry. We were not let in anymore and we were advised to go to dinner buffet.  That was something I have never seen in a cruise ship and we are not even picky. Plastic plates, nothing to eat, nothing. Normal 5 Euros lunch buffet for construction workes is fine dining compared to this one. I would describe it as a snack bar with unappealing choises. Then we noticed that there is also pizza available which would have made this dinner buffet somehow ok. Pizza, pay extra 4,25$. 

As going through the ship I also noticed directly that you have to pay extra for everything. We had a drinking package but not even water available in a cabin and you cannot get water bottle from bar. So, you pay to get water to your cabin. Ice-cream extra 1,5$ etc. 

At this point we were quite disappointed already but still tried to make our cruise comfortable. It did not work, the whole cruise was just pain. Customer service is slow, announcement spoken in bad english after many other languages. Many customers like us are not native english speakers but that is the only language we can use there, so it was hard to handle things because my english is not in excellent level and staff spoke even worse english. 

Still I could have lived with this food issue, bad customer service and all extra payings. But fellow travelers.... Loud, rude, unpolite. We spend the end of our vacation again in a AI-hotel in Dominican Rep. and were so thankful for civilized way other customers acted in a hotel. Customers were north americans and from Scandinavia. Not pushing in line, not shouting in big groups, always paying attention to other peoples presence and not just thinking of themselves.

Huge disappointment!

We took this cruise for two reasons: the great itinerary (initially 6 port stops in 6 days, although the last one in St. Maarten was cancelled after the Sept. hurricanes), and the fact that it was one of the only cruise ships departing from the Dominican Republic where we were spending 3 more weeks on this trip.  All-in-all, we weren’t disappointed.  We expected that the other passengers would be mostly European, but we were flabbergasted to find out that we were the amongst the only English-first-language passengers on the entire ship! (we only heard English being spoken by any passengers between themselves once on the entire cruise).  The passengers were about 30% Italian, 30% French (including many from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and some French-Canadians), 30% Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking (I think mainly from South America), and 9.99% Northern European, who mostly had to communicate with the service crew in English, who were mostly Fillipino, Chinese and Indian, and English was their only second language. Anyway, we didn’t view this as a disadvantage since it lent a decidedly European flair to the cruise, and this may have been the reason that they assigned us our own table-for-two at dinner.

The Isla Catalina stop was basically a beach day at a very nice island beach just a few km off the coast of the D.R. near La Romana. The other four port stops were four very interesting and beautiful islands of the Lesser Antilles, St. Kitts, Antigua, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.  We were not interested in beach, catamaran or scuba tours and wanted to see the interior, seascapes, and historical sites on these islands.  We only took one Costa tour (in St. Kitts) due to the relatively short port stop, and we had previously booked the remainder of shore tours via the internet with private operators, all of which were probably better, longer, and cheaper than those offered by Costa.

The food was generally very good, especially in the main dining room, where the dinners were six courses with fresh plates and the right cutlery for each course, and the service was excellent.  It was mainly Italian with only limited pasta, with mainly fresh ingredients in imaginative dishes.  However, beef and shrimp offerings were limited, and steak and lobster were never offered except for a significant additional cost, even for the gala dinner.  The desserts at dinner, especially the chocolate ones, and also in the buffet at meal and snack times, were excellent. Every day they offered excellent small sandwiches, real Italian pizza, and those excellent desserts in the buffet.  However, that was it for snack foods.

The ship was very clean, with handrails and walls being wiped down often.

The entertainment in the theatre was pretty good, as far as it went.  The lead male and female singers, as well at the dozen dancers were very good, but most of the shows were limited to 45-60 minutes.  However there was no show at all one night, and another night was wasted on “The Voice of the Sea”, basically a corny passenger karaoke show with judges (although this drew the largest crowd from the mostly European passengers – Italian culture at its finest!).  However, we had recently taken an MSC cruise which, although no better in other regards, offered far superior, longer, and more varied theatre entertainment.  In fairness, MSC seems to be head and shoulders above most other cruise lines in this one cruise feature.  The bigger disappointment was the remaining entertainment in the lounges, where the singers and musicians were quite mediocre.  In the main dance lounge, I kid you not, they actually sang that classic, great 1960s hit “Itsy bitsy teeny weenie yellow polka dot bikini” in heavily-accented English with a Latin beat with dozens dancing to it!  Again, Italian culture at it’s finest!

Drink prices were EUR 5-6 for basic beer/wine/liquor, up to EUR 10 for fancy cocktails.  The basic drink package was EUR 188, so you would each have to have almost 6 drinks/day to break even.  Like all cruise lines, they state that bringing alcohol on board is not allowed, but we put a bag of wine and a bottle of scotch in a plastic bottle in our luggage and it was not detected, saving us a few hundred dollars.  Juice/water/coffee/tea was available free only at breakfast, but only water at lunch/dinner, and they had the audacity to put up a sign saying not to fill your water bottles with the free bulk water (yeah, right!).  However, this is a remnant of European culture where one must never stoop to drinking safe tap water, but only expensive bottled water that costs as much as the wine or beer!

As I said, the lower level Filipino, Indian and Chinese staff were generally hard-working, polite, and excellent at their jobs, but some of the mostly Italian senior staff were insufferably snotty. I asked one of them a simple question, which they replied in a haughty and rude tone, and then later it turned out the answer they gave me was totally wrong! 

One little thing, however, really showed their attempt to extract every Euro from the passengers: at the port stop in St. Kitts the ship docked at the commercial port some 3 km from the city centre where the two other piers were taken by other cruise ships.  I would guess that the port authorities would charge more for the premium central piers, however its not unusual for a cruise ship to have to dock at a more distant pier and run a shuttle bus service to the town centre.  What is unusual, however is to have the audacity to charge the passengers EUR 7 to take this shuttle!

However, apart from these minor annoyances, this was a pretty good cruise, and is recommended if you want to see these particular ports and you can get the cruise for a good price.

A pretty good cruise

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