written by Stephen Mellor on 25/04/2010
We sailed out of Fort Lauderdale on the Costa Fortuna to cruise the caribbean and returned 7 days later to enable mostly US citizens to leave the ship and to pick up mainly Europeans for the remainder of the 24 day cruise. The first 7 days was fantastic, but after the US passengers disembarked the food quality was inferior to that of the 1st week. Costa also increased the on board prices by circa 40% by changing the currency from US dollars to Euros. In fact what they did was to change the $ sign for the Euro sign, with no attempt to take the exchange rate into account.We had a meeting with Mr Puckl the "Director of the Hotel services" and he confirmed that we were now entering summer pricing (although it was still only March), and he refused to do anything about it. About 500 British passengers realized what had happened and they were all furious.We will be taking them to court in the UK if they refuse to compensate us for approximately £400 of additional expenditure. They are the most dishonest Cruise line that we have ever sailed with, and this is our 11th cruise.