Costa Classica - Homeward Bound Cruise 30 Apr-19 May 2012

By Smudge

• October 27, 2012

Overall, this was a pleasant cruise with just a few bumps in the road...most were avoidable either by better planning by myself or better organisation from the cruise line. However, the cruise was an extremely pleasant experience on the whole.

I flew out from Manchester to Dubai with Emirates, it was a daytime flight with very few pax on board...all of the flights were arranged by Costa Crociere.

An unusual experience here was the fact that the Costa Crociere representative met me at the plane door, took my hand luggage and escorted m through the airport, we jumped the queue through immigration, he collected my suitcase and we bypassed final security to a stretched limo, which literally whisked me to the ship at break neck speed.....to put this into perspective, from the airbridge meeting the plane at 8pm I was boarding Costa Classica at 8.55pm.

The cruise itself was good, we were well under the capacity with just 647 pax and 825 crew on board.

The food, service and general atmosphere was excellent as always and I met up with several crew from my previous cruises with Costa Crociere...some of whom had been aboard Costa Concordia on January 13. We shared a few hugs and tears...both from meeting again and due to Concordia.

The English hostess, Shannon, was fine...although she did let herself and Costa Crociere down VERY badly on the last day....more on that in a bit.

The ports...Dubai, Sharjah, Oman, Egypt, Corfu, Dubrovnik & Venice.

I am a ship person who rarely gets off the ship, so I can tell you nothing about the ports whatsoever.

Venice disembarkation is where Shannon failed badly. The night before we all had our tags for the various disembarkation times...being on the high tier, I usually am one of the first off but this time for some reason I was one of the last off. I informed Shannon that it would be a problem since the transfer to the airport would get me there after the check-in had started....since it was late evening when we were given the tags, no-one was around to sort it. Very early the next morning instead of watching our arrival in Venice I was busy trying to get on an earlier transfer...no sign of Shannon...I tried to sort the problem out and got nowhere so had another of the hostesses call Shannon at 1030am...she was in bed asleep. I spoke to her on the phone and chewed her off a bit...I eventually took myself off the ship, found my luggage and got on a transfer for the German pax and went to the airport about 4 hours ealier than had been planned.

I have written to Costa Crociere about this and received an appropriate apology.

The shambolic disembarkation, although very annoying, did not really ruin the cruise since I know that Costa Crociere do much better than that.

I am looking forward to my next trip aboard Costa Pacifica in 6 weeks time.