Costa Serena Review
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As a 70 year old grandfather, I flew Emirates alone from Birmingham on the overnight flight to Dubai. Emirates have great food and a generous baggage allowance and I was well within the 30kg limit, even including all of the Christmas presents which I was taking. Flying overnight and the 4 hour time difference meant I wouldn't require a hotel. The flight route, which you can reassuringly monitor on your own screen,carefully avoids the troubled areas (Ukraine,Syria and Iraq) with the final leg over increasingly friendly Iran.
The early morning arrival at Dubai was delayed by a half hour whilst we circled over the Arabian Gulf, waiting for the airport to re-open, after being closed due to the morning fog. On the landing approach, the magnificent sight of the Costa Serena could be seen at berth in the port.
Dubai is a massive hub airport. After an internal train ride, I joined the immigration queue. Allow a good half hour for this if you need the 30 day visitor visa stamp.
Cabin Review
We had internal cabins on deck 6 on the starboard side near the stern. Deck 6 is entirely cabins and its long corridors give easy access to the whole ship via a choice of 3 sets of lifts, bow, stern and midships. The cabins are comfortable, air conditioned, well ventilated and very clean.Being internal cabins you have no daylight so you may need to set an alarm to wake up in the morning. The TV system provides a handful of satellite channels in many languages. It also shows several internal ship channels with useful safety information and shows meetings which you might have missed on an endless loop. You also get the navigational information and the bow and stern web-cam pictures. These are very useful with an internal cabin as you can see land approaching and it gives you an incentive to get up and go on deck.The cabins were fairly quiet, vibration was only felt when the stern thruster was in operation which was on entering or leaving port.