Costa Cruises, Costa Concordia Review

Overall Rating

Great Itinerary.

Most of the cruise.

We are a British family of two adults and two children and we have done three previous family cruises, a cruise for our honeymoon alone and my husband used to work for Carnival. We departed on 6th January on Concordia's 11 night Med. Highlights cruise.
The booking process was painless and we chose cruise only an inside cabin because the children sleep later if it is dark, but had I known how much bigger the outside cabins were in real terms I would have paid the extra. After booking we logged onto the Costa website and booked our excursions and also my wine packages.

Tickets for the excursions were delivered the first night on board and the wine vouchers were brought to me in the restaurant by the assistant maitre'd on our first night so I could use them straight away. My husband had also booked (through the Costa Call centre ~ not available through travel agents) the X1 package which has to be paid for at the time of booking ~ It cost £74.63 for the eleven nights of the cruise and could be used at lunch and dinner in both the restaurant and parigi buffet and was excellent value ~ a large beer was £4.89 including service and he was drinking 3 at dinner = £14.67 a night/£161.37 over the cruise just at night! Just to clarify the X1 package allows drinks by the glass with both lunch & dinner in the buffet & in the restaurants ~ as long as you are in the parigi buffet during lunch hours @ 11am - 3pm with a plate and some food you can use the X1 for your drinks!!

I will say though that we had no trouble in taking alcohol on board for consumption during the cruise ~ at Katakolon the duty free is seriously cheap & decent red wine can be picked up for 3Euros a bottle ~ I took 3 bottles on board plus 6ltrs of coke and 12 lagers without any problems. I took a cork screw in my luggage and just asked for a glass at which ever bar I settled in ~ the staff were happy to oblige.

Embarkation at Civitavecchia was fairly painless and we were on the ship within an hour of arriving at the port ~ others who boarded a day later had waits of up to 5hrs by comparison

When we got to our cabin it was arranged as a king bed with a bunk above at each side and ladders at the end. There was very little floor space and a distinct lack of hanging space ~ so little I ended up putting the kids clothes in piles on the shelves.Cabins walls were woefully under insulated so you could quite happily sit and listen to your neighbors discussions with there spouses and we felt like joining in when they argued. Prams left by people who had them in the corridors outside there cabins ~ an added obstacle at night after a few beers.

Bags were delivered to the cabin within half an hour, so by 2pm we were all ready to go and find some lunch in the buffet. This area was particularly crowded but around the pools there were generally tables to be found. Here comes the confusing part ~ around the rear pool you couldn't smoke but the pool and jacuzzis were for adults only, whilst the mid ship pool with the large screen and for children and families had the smoking area? Please could someone explain the logic behind that? In Britain at least, children's areas are generally smoke free as they do not have a choice where to sit, whereas adults who wish to smoke are quite free to get up and move!

Food in the buffet was Ok, better at times than in the restaurants and usually hotter. At no time did we ever see any one probing food to do temperature checks! In the restaurant the waiters double as wine waiters and had very large areas to cover and as such service was painfully slow ~ a full five courses could take 2 hours and the lights get turned on after an hour and three quarters! There were no soup spoons on the ship so both soup and consomme had to be consumed with desert spoons, food was frequently cold upon arrival and served upon cold plates. With main courses the potatoes and veg were merely symbolic 1 potato, floret of broccoli and a twist of spinach the size of a desert spoon head. Sauces ranged from none existent to bland, to straight from a packet. Pasta was the best thing to eat bar the ice cream.

All of the staff were generally courteous and happy to help ~ but does the mandatory tipping policy take away their need to do that little extra that they would otherwise have done?? Monica our cabin girl was excellent she even emptied the mini bar for us so we could fill it with coke ,wine, water and beers we had bought ashore.

The pool areas were always well stocked with towels and unoccupied sun beds were fairly easy to find. The pools could range from freezing to bath like day to day ~ make sure you take goggles, the chlorine content was so high it bleached my sons turquoise swim trunks to a pale blue with white patches and my white bikini top went yellow. After getting splashed in face one afternoon it took twenty five minutes for the swelling in my left eye to subside.

Activities were loud, but generally only explained in Italian so we didn't join in. The disco of an evening was avoided by adults and became the sole preserve of the late teens ~ the bar lads were constantly checking passports as so many teens wanted alcohol they weren't old enough to drink. (Big up to the bar manger there, he does a great job!)

This is the first ship I have been on where a game between 8 people of black jack has been ended by the croupier as they are not allowed to deal after 2am ~ on other ships I have still been playing at 5am. There is nowhere to get a drink after 2am so don't intend to party the nights before your sea days.

The Squok club was ok, fairly crowded and not really much structure as such if you called early to pick up your child or dropped them of late you would frequently find fights in full flow ~ it got to the point on the last day that my generally pleasant young daughter had had enough of being pushed and hit that when an young lad hit her she walked over to her brother and his friend and asked my son to phone me to pick her up ~ when I arrived she walked over to the lad who had bitten her and smacked him straight in the stomach even though she knew I would smack her! Apparently these were not random acts of violence~ fully fledged fights went on at every session when we asked. Beware in the high season there can be up to 800 children in the three kids club rooms and the have no maximum child to staff ratio (where as on our last cruise with 3 -6 year olds it was 1 staff to 8 children!)The trimmings are shoddy even in the kids club area as a friends child can attest ~ he fell caught his head on dado that wasn't correctly joined and ended up with three stitches ~ and that was in the mini club room!!

I took a shore excursion to Ephesus alone which was excellent and then as family we did the pyramids and Cairo Museum trip ~ a hell of a lot of money for 30 mins at the pyramids, 30 mins at the sphinx, a nice buffet lunch at the le meridien pyramids (the best food of the cruise bar what we bought ourselves in Greece) and 1 and a half hours in the Cairo museum, the rest of the time was given over to shopping! If I had known how how much time was given to Papyrus and gold I would have arranged my own tour.

Disembarkation again was fairly easy but we had arranged our transport into Rome ~ 12.40 Euros by train for the four of us to Rome Termini ~ the taxi driver at the port tried to charge us more to take us to the station (15Euro) ~ the station is the other side of the castle tower on the dockside 800m max. We had had enough of Costa by this point so we disembarked ourselves rather than battle with 200+ others from the theatre to the exit!

The ship was heavily graffittied in the lifts, on tables in public areas and on paintings and art work, in many of the corridors there were generally camped large groups of teens listening to music & smoking. They were replacing trims already (on a ship that's only just 6 months old!) in the buffet and around the pools, tiles around the pool areas have started to rust ~ she looks like she was put together on the bare minimum of a budget and that is reflected in cheap and shoddy nature of the decor.

All in all a disappointing experience & not one I will repeat. If we hadn't of got to see some amazing places with some great company, this trip would have been a total disaster

Members' Comments onShelledpea's Review

• emilymouse on 29th Dec 2008

  I agree with this review because...one year later 1st December 2008 all the points she raised were relevant to our cruise so nothing has changed.