This cruise offered an amazing itinerary staying in Singapore before sailing to Thailand Vietnam Hong Kong China Taiwan and ending with a stay in Tokyo but it was terrible... the lack of organisation and entertainment... even the TV showed just 3 films which repeated on a loop over the 19 nights. The room was the best thing about trip and was kept clean unlike the rest of the ship. General areas were grubby we saw youngsters using the same cloth to wipe every table -no spray and I never saw a hand rail or door handle being cleaned...Worse than this the ship only had two small swimming pools for 5000 people and these were full to capacity with people standing for hours in the warm water... in the event me and my party had tummy upsets for the last 10 days -it was horrible. The food was very poor even the pasta.. everything tasteless no one asked why we were leaving the food or if everything was ok.. I even had to send an omelette back. The bread was the best thing. Worst was the coffee, I was so shocked as Italians boast best coffee in the world this was like dish water which I assume was linked to them wanting you to buy the coffee. This attitude of making money was reflected across the board including water in the dining room. I have been on a number of cruises where free transport is offered to town etc. Costa did not lay on one item of free transport but worse they withheld the fact that the local port offered free transport to nearest town.

Every disembarkation was a mess with Costa giving contrary advice and taking hours. Worst for me was Hong Kong ...this itinerary had already been shortened to accommodate a longer stop in China. The captain decided to stay in port longer but did not tell us so we rushed back only to find a letter in the room saying they were leaving later This was very annoying as we had had to limit what we could see in one of the most interesting stop overs. Finally pre visit Costa had insisted we needed a visa for China even if we were not getting off the boat. We were told we would not be allowed to embark if we did not have the visa. In the event loads of people did not have a visa and we had paid £750 for our party to get visa's which we never needed and never used.