I’ve just disembarked a cruise on one of the biggest and most controversial cruise ships in the world where only 4% of guests spoke English. The ship I was cruising on was the Costa Smeralda built in 2019 and the ship actually has the lowest Cruise Critic rating I’ve ever seen in addition to being the overall worst rated cruise line.
Before I booked the cruise I read reviews that said things like ‘this ship is not set up for English speakers at all’, people said that there was ‘no entertainment’, somebody said that monkeys could do a better job than the crew and one review even said the ship was ‘ANTI FOOD’. A big part of cruising is eating, so I hoped that wasn’t the case.
When I saw a Costa cruise for £279 for the week I knew that I had to give it a go, I wanted to find out for myself if the bad reviews were justified and from the promotional videos I’d seen, the ship definitely looked exciting.
For £38 per night I didn’t have huge expectations and all I knew was that the cruise would be very different from what I’m used to cruising with American and British cruise lines. The ship turned out to be so much better in some ways, and also so much worse than I could have imagined in others. It definitely was an adventure.
We embarked the ship in Barcelona and set sail for 7 nights cruising the Mediterranean. Embarkation was very easy and as soon as I stepped into the ship I started to realise what it would it meant to be cruising on an Italian cruise, from Spain.
