Had an ace time on Victoria in the Aegean - Ask away!

[Hogwash]

Booked Late for the Aegean Easter cruise, Savona-Naples-Piraeus-Marmaris-Rhodos-Ketakalon-Savona, 22nd-29th March...

 

Got a heavily discounted Deck 4 forward, class 7 cabin (external with window), for the four of us; 2 adults 2 children.

 

First time cruisers so no comparative opinions available; that said, personal ratings out of 10 follow...

 

Ship's Facilities 7+

Cleanliness 9+

Crew 8+

Cabin 7

Food 8

Entertainment 6+

Excursion(s) 8 (Only did one)

 

General family opinion 8/10.

 

Would cruise again? Definitely.

 

With Costa? Yep. No problems there. But would probably try the Caribbean next time.

 

More Detail follows when I've had chance to clear my mountainous in-tray. Happy to answer all questions.

 

Regards, H

[RICHLOVE]

We are leaving Sunday on the Fortuna out of Savona. What did you do in Naples and how did you get to Savona?

[Hogwash]

In Naples, we just kept our hands on our valuables and walked round the shopping mall nearest the wharfe, drank coffe and the kids ate some great ice cream. Didn't do the Vesuvius bit, nor could we see it from the city as it was too cloudy.

 

As to Savona, we bought the coach transfer from Milan Malpensa at the time of booking, which went without a hitch and proved a spectacular journey, as we neared the coast, through many tunnels and over numerous vertiginous elevated sections and bridges.

 

Italian motorway driving standards continue to scare though. :eek:

[RICHLOVE]

Thank you for the info we are also tacking the train from Milan to Savona. What do you do with your luggage on the train?

[Hogwash]

Can't help you regarding the train Richlove, our transfer was by bus.

[Hogwash]

OK. First bash at the detail.

 

Booked about a week in advance (!) through Page & Moy.

 

Got the flight we wanted, from Manchester, to Milan Malpensa, but were advised that we'd have to wait all day for a 19:00hrs return after disembarkation, staging through Heathrow. This turned out not to be true, of which more later.

 

BA wouldn't let us book in our baggage early (some airlines will let you check in the night before - always ask), but booking-in on the morning of the flight was swift. Lots of desks open. Couldn't use the self-check-in machines as we were travelling with the kids. (I just knew we should have left them with the cat. :D )

 

Met at Malpensa by the Costa rep, half-an-hour later we were on the coach.

 

Two hours twenty after that we made it to the Costa embarkation facility at Savona, 'bout 13:30hrs. Then a fairly long wait until embarkation just after 16:30hrs. Bring Gameboys for the kids.

 

It was all well managed with individual groups' numbers being called at about twenty minute intervals. The facility is pleasant enough with a good bar and plenty of seating. (Don't forget that in Italian bars you order and pay first and then take your till receipt, il sconterino, to the bartender and get your drinks etc.)

 

Make sure you get the appropriate colour luggage labels from the Costa rep that greets the coach, train, taxi, bicycle, whatever, and fill in name and cabin number clearly. Without those your suitcases might get lost during transfer aboard.

 

Once aboard, met Kamaludin, our cabin steward, and our luggage, already in the cabin. Kamal was characteristic of the rest of the crew, friendly and helpful. Good with the kids too: they took to him immediately.

 

Class 7 cabin was compact and bijou, but with all mod cons and comfy beds. Large outside window and mini-bar with a list of fairly prohibitive prices. Girls loved the 'upstairs' bunks and wardrobe space was more than adequate for all our clobber. Impressed with the free safe activated with a swipe of any of our Costa cards.

 

Then began the exploration of a great ship. My my. Where to start..?

 

First impression: sumptuous, and clean! Spotless. More soon.

 

Keep those questions coming.

 

H :)

[TCinCT]

I enjoyed reading your report, H! I laughed out loud about the kids and the cat. We will be on the Victoria in April for a Greek Isles and Croatia tour and your review is appreciated. Thanks for offering to answer any questions. How was the weather for swimming in the pools? Do we bring our toga wardrobe along?

[mensch999]

We leave on the April 6 voyage from Savona to Venice.

 

Were there many English speakers on your cruise?

Were there many smokers?

[Hogwash]

More recollections of a week aboard...

 

Exploring: Decided to adopt a simple rule: "if a door isn't explicitly marked 'Emergency Only', or 'Crew Only', go through it." (The Ladies sauna occupants forgave me by cruise's end. )

 

I needed a full day and a half just to cover all the ship, and three more days to learn it. Then I discovered a bar I'd never seen before on day 5. Excellent.

 

At 76,000tons, the scale of the vessel is amazing. Goodness knows what Magica must be like at 105,000tons, let alone QM2, which, I understand, is half as big again! You could get lost for days - with a bit of luck.

 

On 11 decks out of a possible 13, (well, the numbers say 12/14, but there's no deck 13, can't think why, and decks 1 & 2 are where the engineers have their playpen, or engine room, as they call it), and at 250m long, Costa Victoria is built on a heroic scale.

 

The Atria in particular are amazing, the upper balconies in the Concorde Plaza in the bow are a great place to watch a live band from and the glass lifts are fun to use. The theatre, the Festival Lounge to give it its correct title, is also impressive with real-time TV to large screens either side of the stage for anybody with limited visibility - usually through strong drink.

 

The casino is enormous, loud, expensive looking and eminently avoidable.

 

Check out http://www.finesthotels.net/costa-cruises/costa-victoria.php for some good pictures of the ship which however, despite the text burbling on about the recent refit, balconies, etc, etc, show images of its pre-refit state. Still, pretty representative for all that. The Costa Cruise site's pretty good too if you can get QuickTime to work properly.

 

Info: 'Today' is the daily ship's newspaper, printed late each evening and delivered to your cabin. Also available at the Information Office on deck 5 are digests of various European newspapers are also faxed to the ship, including the UK's own "Daily Fear" (Sorry: "Daily Mail"). Most of the ports have others, at less than extortionate prices.

 

Europeans, take your mobile phones if you must. You can just throw a jumper over your shoulders and pretend to be an Italian businessman. Just stride up and down an open deck waving your free arm and crying 'Allora' a lot. Get your service provider to enable roaming and you'll find the ship has a GSM service that provides coverage at all times. It's a satellite uplink though so I've no idea what my brief and infrequent calls to UK are going to cost me. (An arm and a leg probably.)

 

Didn't use the Internet lounge. Looked expensive and I figured, why deny myself the opportunity of deleting something vital from my inbox along with the hundreds of spam-mails, on my return home..?

 

Eating: Found that Victoria has two restaurants, open for breakfast, lunch and dinner (two sittings for the latter, 7:00pm and 9:00pm). For Dinner, the only meal at which you have an assigned table and restaurant - you should have filled in a preference form as part of your booking procedure. If you book late, ring Costa and ask for one to be faxed to you. In UK, they're on 020 7940 4499 and I found them very helpful. Also, if you haven't got one yet, trawl your travel agents for a current brochure, it's got lots more info, including ship deck plans and the inevitable fine print - some of which is well worth reading and is a cure for insomnia to boot! NB As with the above link, Cruise Critic's Victoria page is well out of date as the vessel now has oodles of balcony cabins following last year's refit.

 

But I digress. The two main restaurants are augmented by one special one, Zeffirino's, open for dinner only, with a 20euro per head cover charge, which we didn't see the need to use, and about a dozen buffets, ranging from a basic pizza and cake bar, through dogs, burgers and fries, to the major Bolero buffet that's open three times a day too offering everything from fruit through pasta to main dishes, plus an omelette bar at breakfast time, plus canapés in the Orpheus bar and room service 24/7. Didn't use the latter so don't know what the costs are.

 

Out of your cabin, you could eat solidly for about 19 out of 24hrs. I reckon that I put back on the 10lbs I had deliberately lost in about 6 days flat, and I was taking it easy and doing a dozen laps of Carmen deck a day, albeit at a slow pace, but hey, I put the miles in! At one point we were fighting off our waiters at dinner, whose mission in life seemed to be to send us home in (XXL) body bags. Tomi & Deepak! You know who you are! (And I hope we'll be seeing you again, soon.)

 

Food: Excellent. Perhaps a little more bland than full-on Italian cooking might merit; not as many fiery dishes as I would personally have enjoyed, but a very wide range of all manner of foodstuffs on offer, all tasty, all hot and all beautifully presented. Oysters, lobster, lamb, pork and beef, chicken and some lovely fish, more pizza/pasta than you could shake a stick at and the best poached eggs with asparagus and crevette sauce I've ever tasted for lunch one day.

 

 

The soups in particular were superb, Emily says you're to check out the chilled cherry soup, and Jane demonstrated that she could cut the Beef Wellington with her fork! Everybody but me enjoyed the puddings, largely because I was nose down in the most delicious cheese selection: the Italian Gorgonzola with a Ruby port - Ai Madonna!

 

Three Gala nights were put on, 2nd, 5th & 6th in our case but that might have been distorted by the fact that this was an Easter cruise. (Still that meant free Easter eggs in the cabin. Yahoo! Chocolate frenzy!) Dress was casual on other nights, dark suit, or jacket and tie on GNs. Free Spumante for toasts! Good too.

Drinks: Generally, drink prices are pitched about the same as expensive UK hotel prices: £3.50 a pint for Heineken, 'bout the same for spirits n'mixers, £12-20 for a bottle of wine, all including the added service charge on drinks. By comparison, the wine package that you can buy from the embarkation facility is good value at about £75 for eight bottles of wine and a dozen bottles of mineral water, as is the children's card, which is actually a book of vouchers, like the adult variant, which are good for some 16 soft drinks or analcollica cocktails - I forgot to count them.

If you go for the latter though, mark each drink chit with the owner's name and cabin number, so if you lose them, as Emily did, the lucky finder will be better motivated to hand them in.

There's free water, fruit juice, tea and coffee available round-the-clock from dispense machines on the open-air buffet at the stern of Rigoletto deck.

Teaholics; try the different teas, they're quite fragrant and satisfying. The coffee's good too, and free Grapefruit juice? Bliss. Watch out for the ice & water dispensers though. When set to 'both', they have a habit of vomiting wet ice cubes into your glass at a rate guaranteed to wake you up at breakfast time!

 

Entertainment? Not bad. OK, Las Vegas it ain't, but the various shows were a sight better than any of the many package deal hotel itineraries I've seen. And the gang, particularly the Costa Victoria dancers worked really hard and put out some polished performances. Oh yes, and a nice touch... My youngest tried to take a note to the dancers after she'd been particularly taken with their efforts on one particular evening, and with their costumes. But she was refused admission backstage by one of the techies who however took the note back and reported its safe receipt...

The next thing we know, the Theatre Manager has traced us, some quarter-hour later to invite Rube, her sister, and Mum, to meet the dancers and see their wardrobe. You won't be surprised to hear that we were all impressed!

 

The only serious gripe with the cruise, for us, was the kids club. Too few English speaking families meant that the translation in the games and organised activities was inadequate, leading to our two losing interest fast.

Not that it mattered as they're both fairly self-propelled creatures, as happy with a colouring book or an open air hot tub as with anything Guiseppe could dream up. Made a couple of friends, as did we (wotcher, Lee, Shane & the lovely Sonya and Hannah) towards the back-end of the cruise and away they went. Bear it in mind though and ring Costa to ask if it's been sorted, when booking. We certainly mentioned it in the feedback forms and we know others did too. Don't think that it cannot have been sorted this soon... They can source, hire and integrate a new crewmember and invent new processes in a week if they want to. Let's crack the whip, eh.?!

Weather: The eastern Med in late March was bright but a bit chilly, shorts and T-shirt weather, but only just. Didn't stop the children from using the hot tubs but there were only a couple of days, both in one port or another, that were warm enough to tempt anybody into the unheated pools. Including the indoor one, which was also perishing! I found the sight of several hundred fully dressed people sunbathing a hoot, but even with the sun shining brightly and the three upper decks being surrounded by glass screens, whilst at sea, it only took the 20knot breeze over the bow to send most people scuttling back to the inside bars and suchlike.

The sea was a millpond until we turned for home on day 6, when it began to get a bit choppy. Compared with what the sea can chuck at you, it was nothing really, just sufficient to create some movement and give the ship's stabilizers a piece of the action. A couple of people looked a bit green by day 7, but that might have been hangovers.

Budget: Everything is included in your end of cruise bill except premium services (beauty salon etc), on-board purchases (perfume, jewellery etc), drinks and excursions. A service charge of about 40euros for adults and 20 for kids was also added, though you can ask to change or even remove that entirely if you hardly use the restaurants. Leave a bit on for your cabin steward though, particularly if he's as diligent as ours was - I'm pretty sure I'm right in suspecting that these guys don't get paid a fat lot and the tips probably constitute a significant fraction of their income.

The four of us drank lots, (LOTS in my case) went on one excursion (Lindos on Rhodes - beautiful!) and spent about £1k in 8 days.

Payment: The ship is cashless, everything going onto your Costa Card and being signed for.

You can either carry enough readies or travellers checks to cover your final bill(s); don't forget that each of your party will contribute something to the grand total, even if they don't use their Costa Cards. Failing that, take your favourite credit card to the Information Office at some point and register it, then your bill is just debited from that directly.

Special Mentions: Tony Joseph in the Ghost Bar (find it!) - stimulating conversations on Indian politics available - just ask; Lois the photog - probably the only ship's snapper with a law degree; Hermie* and Carmen (Cameron?) Diaz, the cream of cocktail waitresses; the aforementioned Kamaludin, Deepak and Tomi; the delightful and learned ship's pianist (whose name I stupidly neglected to memorise - forgive me Maestro - who's a mine of historical and geographical information. If you're a culture vulture and he's going on an excursion, steal a ticket, stick close and listen-up.)

*(If you want an example of the average level of dedication the crew put in, Hermie won't see her 7week old daughter again until November: how crap is that in 2005?! Come on Costa. Give such staff a mid contract break and a free air ticket back home. Your marketing department will pay, if they've any sense, giving us all a nice little saving on the back of enhanced turnover due to even happier staff. Come on. Think 'better', not just 'bigger'. I never cease to be amazed at the inhospitable way that the workers in the hospitality industries are treated.)

And where would we have been without Freddie; Representativa Inglesi-type person? If there's a more cheerful and helpful soul this side of perdition, he's yet to reveal his self. Find out fast where Freddie's briefings are. We didn't and missed out on lots of 'local' knowledge that we then had to learn the harder, no, slower way.

Smokers: I've read much complaint, principally from our esteemed US cousins, on the subject of the prevalence of these poor, drugged, wilfully addicted, cruelly used, tortured and soon-to-be-murdered individuals, on Costa boats... (I guess that exposes me as the angry, vindictive, anti-tobacco company, potential nutcase that I have the honour to be. Aw shucks. My apologies to the farmers of Virginia and other locations around the globe, but you are actually engaged in killing people - much more efficiently than Al Qu'aeda, incidentally. End of rant.)

As a reformed smoker (you guessed, didn't you?), I found the fuming passengers to be numerous but tolerable. I did however have a difficult time trying to explain to my daughters that my suggestion that we should spend the remainder of our funds buying up all the cigarettes in the duty free and hurling them over the side was, regrettably, only a joke. They were well up for it.

No really though, it was OK. All the bars and restaurants had clearly marked smoking/vietato fumare! areas, the aircon coped admirably and the lifts, stairwells, passageways and swimming pools were clean.

Whinges: Few, aside from the kids’ events already mentioned. As an engineer I’d have liked a tour of the major machinery spaces but that was ruled out by the inevitable ‘security’ restrictions – which is bull really, and even if it was justified, there’s nothing to stop some of the junior engineers being made available to answer questions or give lectures.

 

 

I guess the shops could have stocked some slightly more substantial than bangles and smellies. Books maybe?

That said, I never did use the library. So much to do. So little time.

 

Hope this recollection helps. If I think of anything else I'll post it.

 

Cheerio and contented cruising to you all. As Arnie may have said, "We'll be back!"

 

H

[gidliu]

Hello,

 

Just a few quick questions. Appreciate any advice!!

 

- we have booked a mini-suite, does it come with any of the "regular" suite services/perks like priority embarkation, in-room meals, etc.?

- spa services: what's free what's not? what's worth a try what's not?

 

 

Thanks!