ZCosta Concordia

This particular cruise changes picks up/drops at every port, so look forward to being woken up by baggage handling almost every night. Because of the different languages being spoken by passengers all announcements including entertainment act introductions seem to drag on forever. Please remember that the lifeboat drill takes 7 times longer as instructions/demonstrations are repeated in all languages. Attending the buffet breakfast is an experience and takes you back to the good old days of "Hi De Hi", that is if you can manage to obtain a table and hang on to it (keep one person seated at all times). The buffet selection is very poor and when snacking out of hours in the buffet restaurant, you have a choice of "pizzas" providing you can establish which of the serving counters will be open (the buffet restaurant has at least 8). The main restaurant service is a bit mediocre, with portions being small and picturesque.
It was found that the fun part of the meal was the excitement of what you would receive, often the description on the menu did not match the dish served. The food quality also varied from rejectable to tasty (I am looking forward to pizza again). Towards the end of the week many people had caught on to ordering a main course as a starter in order to satisfy themselves without having pizza.
There seemed to be one thing in common with most english people at the end of the week and that was "we will be glad to get off this ship".

The following applies to people embarking/disembarking at Savona.
Please read the instructions from Cruise Club UK, because Easy Jet arrives at terminal 2 in Milan Malpensa and the coach departs from terminal 1. When we arrived a Costa rep was awaiting for us at terminal 2, but managed to group together more passengers than the coach could hold so we (8 in total) ended up being transferred to terminal 1 after waiting around for 2 hours (yep this was going to be a long day). However embarking was relatively easy, could this be because we were probably the last coach.

The coach trip takes approximately two and a half hours including one stop from Milan to Savona

Disembarking was relatively easy, mainly because the multi disembarkation ports meant that only a small section of the passengers were disembarking.

Arriving at Milan Malpensa terminal 2 via terminal 1 (and the airport inter-terminal bus), it would seem that the Costa coaches cannot manage to take passengers to terminal 2 direct even though the majority of passengers were flying Easy Jet from terminal 2.

At the check in at terminal 2, the Easy Jet personnel were found to be very helpful and enabled people to transfer to vacancies on earlier flights. Costa reps could learn a lot from these.

Please Costa remember the following.
That just by organising transport to/from terminal 2 at Malpensa could make the Costa Holiday a more pleasant experience