Emerald Princess - Eastern Med/Greek Isle Cruise - September 2, 2007 Rome to Venice
The following review is about our experiences with airlines, airports, hotels (pre and post cruise), private tours and independent touring. We enjoyed meeting everyone on the roll call and sharing tours with them. For each of the private tours I arranged, I emailed to each participant who was sharing a particular tour with us the meeting place on board the ship (usually the Piazza on Plaza deck (Deck #5) since most of the time we would be disembarking from midship Deck#4 , time to meet, cost and recap of the tour prior to our leaving the US. I collected the monies for the tour (excluding any tips or lunch costs) each day at the meeting place prior to disembarking the ship.
Precruise: Rome - 2 days Airline: We booked in early March our open jaw tickets through US Airways online. I thought we were going to have electronic ticketing and to my surprise they sent us paper tickets. Reason: We had a codeshare ticket as the flights we choose from US Airways would have us departing Venice on Lufthansa for a flight to Frankfurt and then changing to US Airways in Frankfurt to fly to Philadelphia and then onward to Ithaca -our final destination. I'll provide some feedback on the return flights further in the review and our experience with Frankfurt and Philadelphia airports on the return. No problems with the flights to Rome. Immigration in Rome was a breeze. No long lines as they quickly moved everyone through. Baggage was slightly delayed but perhaps a good thing as we had time to chat and meet some of the members from the Cruise Critic roll call. Luggage carts were either 1 or 2 euros.