This cruise was spotted by my other half and was arranged by an agent who did a superb job and as the holiday included 2 days in Venice before sailing they arranged a great hotel (Hilton Garden, Mestre) and unbelievably good transfers from airport to hotel, hotel to port and port to airport (Acampora Venice, super cars, absolutely top service) and the Easy Jet flights were exactly that.

Cruise Day 1. We are dropped off at Venice Cruise Terminal - chaos! Poor communications compounded by the fact that the ship was at Trieste due to fog! Eventually everyone gets onto coaches for the 2 hour journey. The weather is not Costa's fault! Eventually we get onto the ship and Costa Deliziosa is a great ship, very clean, better cabin than expected. Prior to departure we were told by our cabin boy not to go to dinner (we were first sitting) because of the lifeboat drill. Okay so we assume that on Day one the ship won't enforce the 2 sitting policy. Wrong, the did and we had to have dinner in the buffet. In reality, we would have had time to dine at the first sitting and do the lifeboat drill so bad info from cabin boy on Day 1.

Breakfast was fine except that a cup of tea is a teapot of almost hot water and a selection of tea bags. It took forever to get milk. The advice here is to get a fruit juice glass of milk from the cereal bar! Second problem - toast - grief it looks like its seen a light bulb! I think this could be an Italian thing because toast at the hotel before sailing was very pale after one pass through the conveyor belt toaster but the second pass produced a good result! I think I got toast of a sort on 2 occasions despite requesting it 3 times - but life is too short!! Read more