Costa Cruises Reviews: Ships, Fares and What’s Included

Costa Cruises is Italy’s own line: Genoa-based, Italian-flagged and built for southern European and South American passengers. Eight ships cover the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, the Caribbean, South America and the Middle East on a mainstream, good-value product. The multilingual buzz and late dinners are what surprise British first-timers most.

Who Costa suits: Italian-led, multilingual and late to dinner

Costa is the only cruise line sailing under the Italian flag, and it’s headquartered in Genoa. The same group owns AIDA Cruises, the German brand.

On board, most passengers are southern European or South American. On most Mediterranean sailings, English speakers are the minority.

Announcements usually come in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. The cruise director’s welcome and the trivia quizzes run in several languages too, which slows them down. Dinner runs late by British standards: around 7pm for early sitting and 9pm for late on the newest ships, nearer 6:45pm and 8:30pm on the older ones.

Book Costa if you want a properly European atmosphere, a late evening and a low headline fare, and you’re happy to be one of several nationalities rather than the majority. Look elsewhere if you want an English-first bubble with early dinners and comedy and quiz nights in one language.

The most consistent criticism in English-language reviews is the multilingual, European feel rather than a quality defect. Reviewers who expected an English-first line describe feeling like outsiders. That’s a booking mistake, not a ship fault.

What your fare includes: My Cruise, Comfort Plus, Super Comfort Plus and All Inclusive

Every Costa fare covers full board, port taxes, your cabin, the pools, entertainment and the relaxation areas. It also includes a nightly Destination Dish in the main dining room, created by Bruno Barbieri, Hélène Darroze and Ángel León. Anything beyond that is a drinks or excursions tier.

The names are where people get tangled. The UK site uses Comfort Plus and Super Comfort Plus, and on the same drinks page you’ll see All Inclusive and Super All Inclusive for what look like the same bundles.

Older labels such as Basic and Deluxe still show up in agent listings and in brochure PDFs that are still floating around. Compare the inclusions line by line instead of trusting the label on the quote.

Outside the fare, expect to pay for drinks, speciality restaurants, pizza and gelato on the ships where they’re chargeable, the spa and shore excursions.

The service charge: EUR 11 a night per adult, plus 15% on bar bills

Costa’s hotel service charge is EUR 11 per person per night for guests aged 15 and over. Children aged 4 to 14 pay EUR 5.50 a night, and under-4s pay nothing.

US departures are charged in dollars at USD 12.50, and South America sailings on Costa Diadema at USD 14.50 for adults and USD 7 for children. A 15% gratuity goes on bar orders charged to your onboard account, which is one reason a drinks package is worth pricing properly. Watch for a rise to EUR 12 for adults and EUR 6 for children.

The awkward part is whether you’ve already paid it. Costa’s general conditions say the hotel service charge is already included in My Cruise, All Inclusive and Super All Inclusive fares.

It may be excluded from promotional fares, in which case it’s charged daily on board. Other booking terms describe it as a nightly charge added to your account.

The two versions conflict, so ask at the point of booking and get the answer in writing.

If it does appear on your account, Guest Services can adjust it before you leave the ship. After that, adjustments are final.

Check your account early in the cruise, not on the last morning. If you’re weighing Costa against a line where tips are bundled, read up on how tipping works on other cruise lines before you compare totals.

Costa drinks packages: My Drinks, My Drinks Plus and the maths

My Drinks costs £20 to £36 per person per day if you book it online with the cruise, and £42 a day if you buy it on board. My Drinks Plus runs £34.30 to £50.30 per person per day in a Suite booked with the cruise, and £57 on board.

It comes included with a Suite booking. Guests aged 3 to 17 get a cheaper alcohol-free version, at £19 per person per day if bought on board.

Everyone on the reservation or in the cabin has to take the package. It doesn’t work in the Archipelago or Casanova restaurants, some bars and theme restaurants list only a reduced selection, and premium brands and minibar items are excluded from My Drinks.

My Drinks includes one 0.5-litre bottle of San Benedetto water per person per day for adults. My Drinks Plus adds unlimited bottled water and the minibar. Neither package is included in My Cruise or in promotional fares.

Do the maths before you commit. Cocktails and house wine sit at around EUR 8 to EUR 10 a glass, and bottled water at around EUR 3.50 a litre.

The cheapest My Drinks tier pays for itself at roughly three drinks a day, and the top of the range needs nearer five. A light-drinking couple should price paying as they go.

If you’re thinking of taking a package, weigh whether drinks packages are worth the money on your own habits rather than on the brochure.

Bottle packages and fixed numbers of soft drinks are also sold on board, and they work out worse per drink than the unlimited packages.

Costa cruise tips: dress code, alcohol, smoking and the cashless card

Get these wrong and you’ll either pay at the gangway or feel underdressed on gala night.

• No alcohol on board. You can’t bring drink on when you board or in ports. Bottles bought ashore are held and returned when you leave the ship. Soft drinks aren’t allowed either, and water is permitted only for medical needs.
• The dress code is suggested, not enforced. Casual by day, casual-smart at dinner, and one or two gala nights in a week where a suit and cocktail dress are recommended. A tuxedo or gown isn’t required, T-shirts aren’t allowed on gala evenings, and shorts and swimwear are never permitted in the main dining room.
• Smoking is allowed only in balcony cabins, where a wall ashtray is provided.
• The ship is cashless. The Costa Card is the only way to pay, a payment method must be registered within 24 hours of boarding, and prepaid or rechargeable cards aren’t accepted. A cash deposit of at least EUR or USD 150 per person can be made at the Cash Deposit Machine, and the card can be deactivated if spending passes EUR or USD 200 with nothing registered.
• Sockets are standard European, so the one piece of kit UK passengers forget is a European power adapter for the cabin.
• Dinner sitting changes go through the maître d’ or the Costa App under Restaurants and Bars, subject to availability.
• Cabin cleaning is once a day, during daytime hours.

Costa Cruises ships: Toscana, Smeralda, Diadema, Fascinosa, Favolosa, Pacifica, Serena and Deliziosa

These ships aren’t one product. Two LNG mega-ships, a middle tier of 2010s ships carrying around 3,800 guests and one small ship all behave very differently. Guest figures are at full occupancy and rounded, so treat them as a comparison, not a promise.

Costa Fortuna, at 2,720 guests, is off to Margaritaville at Sea. The Venezia-class ships now sail for Carnival, so any Costa deck plan or review that still mentions them is out of date.

Costa cabins: guaranteed cabins, European sockets and no minibar on the LNG ships

All cabins have air conditioning, a safe, a hairdryer, bath and pool towels, standard European sockets and, on some ships, USB ports. They take a maximum of four guests. Every ship except Costa Toscana and Costa Smeralda has a minibar in the cabin.

The cheaper Guaranteed Cabin rate is the trap. A standard fare lets you pick the deck and the position at booking.

The guaranteed rate gives you a provisional allocation with no choice of deck or location, and the final cabin is assigned later, so you can’t steer away from a noisy deck. If location matters, pay for the standard fare. If you’re unsure, read how to choose a cabin location before you book.

Suites add an assigned table in an exclusive restaurant or reserved area, a butler, a coffee machine, a pillow menu and a free visit to the spa area during port hours, though not on Costa Serena. Smoking is permitted in balcony cabins only.

Food on Costa: the dining room is the strength, the buffet the weak point

The main dining room is table service, with a changing Mediterranean and international menu and the nightly Destination Dish included. The buffet is where British passengers notice the difference, because it isn’t an all-day operation. On the older ships it runs roughly 7:30am to 9:30am, noon to 2pm and 7pm to 9pm, with nothing open continuously in between.

On the newest ships lunch ends at 3pm and nothing reopens until dinner except tea and cakes from 4:30pm to 5:30pm. Buffet dinner starts at 8pm.

Non-bottled water, tea and coffee are included at breakfast and in the buffet, and most other drinks carry a charge. If you eat late, note that once the buffet closes for the night there’s no free food until breakfast, so eat before the late show.

Pizza is chargeable on some ships. Pummid’Oro serves a margherita at around EUR 9 and premium pizzas at around EUR 15, and stays open until 1am, so it helps to know what the Pizza Time pizzeria serves and costs. On other ships the buffet turns into a free evening pizzeria with table service, as Tulipano Nero does on Costa Fascinosa, so ask before you budget.

The chargeable venues across the fleet include Pummid’Oro, Archipelago, Sushino, Teppanyaki, KikiPoke, Salty Beach street food and Gelateria Amarillo gelato.

Costa entertainment: visual shows, six languages and no comedy club

Shows are built to work without language: acrobatics, dance, music and visual spectacle rather than narrative theatre or comedy. There’s no comedy club and no licensed musical production, so if spoken-word entertainment is the reason you cruise, Costa is the wrong line.

On the two LNG ships, the three-deck Colosseo atrium hosts nightly shows using the full height of the space. Older ships have small theatres and modest productions. Evenings centre on the bars, live music and the atrium rather than a tight theatre schedule, which fits the later Italian dinner rhythm.

Costa for families: Squok Club, teen zones and child drinks packages

Squok Club covers ages 3 to 11, and the teen zone covers 12 to 17. There’s a Squok Baby Area for 0 to 3, which on the two LNG ships also takes children under six alongside a family restaurant.

Membership is free and included in the cruise price. The clubs are open every day from 9am to midnight; some ships publish fixed slots of 9am to noon, 3pm to 6pm and 9pm to midnight.

Children aged 3 to 17 get an alcohol-free drinks package that’s cheaper than the adult version. Because packages must be bought by everyone on the same reservation or cabin, work out the family total before you decide, not the adult price alone.

Where Costa sails, and the Southampton departures

The Mediterranean is the core: weeklong Italy, France, Spain and Tunisia loops, Western Mediterranean sailings, and 14-night Canaries, Madeira and Morocco itineraries. Northern Europe and the fjords run from Kiel to Copenhagen and Norway, and from Hamburg to Britain, Iceland and Norway.

The Caribbean is served by seven-night sailings from the Dominican Republic and Martinique, South America from Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, and the Middle East by winter Dubai and Abu Dhabi loops to the UAE, Qatar and Oman. Long voyages include a Tokyo to Buenos Aires sailing that calls at 24 destinations and a world voyage from Italian, Spanish and French ports.

For a UK passenger, this is largely a fly-cruise line. The no-fly options are repositioning sailings rather than a season.

Costa Diadema runs Southampton to Kiel as a four-night one-way via Zeebrugge, with a five-night version as well, and both fall in May. If you want a wider choice of no-fly cruises from UK ports, another line will serve you better.

It’s still worth checking cruises that start at Southampton for the years when a Costa repositioning lands.

What a Costa cruise really costs

Costa sells on the lowest headline fare in the Mediterranean market, and that fare is real: the cabin, the food in the main dining room and the buffet, the pools and the shows are all in it. The mistake is treating the headline as the holiday price.

Add the drinks, either as a package or a la carte, plus the nightly service charge, plus speciality dining, gelato and pizza where they’re chargeable, plus excursions. A couple on My Cruise who add My Drinks and the service charge have closed much of the gap with a fare that bundles both.

That’s why the comparison has to be made on totals rather than on the quote. Use the daily on-board spend calculator to build the full number before you book.

Costa vs MSC and Ambassador: what the difference is

Costa and MSC are the two Italian-led, multilingual mainstream lines, and their fleets are at different points in their lives. Most Costa ships are early-2010s builds, while MSC’s are mostly late-2010s and newer. If the ship itself is the holiday for you, that gap matters more than the itinerary, so it’s worth looking at MSC’s ships and what they include before you decide.

Ambassador is the other end of the comparison for British passengers. Its service charge is £7 per person per night, £6 on cruises of 15 nights or more, £4 for 12 to 17s and nothing under 12.

Its top Ambassador Fare bundles gratuities, premium drinks and unlimited soft drinks into the price. Costa’s equivalent is a separate purchase, so the two only compare once My Drinks and the service charge are added to the Costa quote.

Check Ambassador’s fares and what they bundle against a Costa total, not against a Costa headline.

Is Costa any good? What the reviews praise and what they criticise

The praise for Costa is consistent on three things: value for money, Italian food and espresso, and the international atmosphere. The criticism is just as consistent: multilingual announcements, older ships, weak spoken-word entertainment and service that reacts rather than anticipates.

What that adds up to depends on the ship. Judged as a family-value Mediterranean week with a resort feel, it does what it promises.

Judged as a first cruise that will tell you whether you like cruising at all, a very cheap week can give a false impression. If you’re unsure, book the newest ship in the fleet, where the resort side is strongest and the ship itself carries the holiday.

You may have seen Costa tagged as the worst-rated line in the market. Most of what sits behind those ratings is language, timing and a European passenger mix.

Those are choices, not defects. The complaints that read as faults are usually about expectation rather than hardware.

Booking Costa from the UK: fare names, market pricing and the app

Costa prices the same product differently by market website. The UK site quotes in pounds while others quote euros for the identical package, so the number you see depends on which country’s site you’re on. Buy the drinks package with the cruise rather than on board and the saving is immediate.

Fare structure is the thing to pin down. The same cabin is sold as My Cruise, Comfort Plus, All Inclusive and older labels depending on channel.

The UK brochure PDFs in circulation are years out of date. Ignore them and check the inclusions on the current quote instead.

Name changes on a booking carry a EUR 50 per person fee, which matters if you’re booking for a group. On board, the Costa App holds the daily programme and is also where you register a restaurant or dinner sitting preference.

Costa Cruises FAQs

Which country is Costa Cruises based in?

Costa is an Italian line, headquartered in Genoa and flying the Italian flag. Costa Crociere is part of Carnival Corporation and plc, which is listed in London and New York. The same group owns AIDA Cruises, the German brand.

Is Costa a luxury cruise line?

No, Costa is a mainstream line priced at the value end of the Mediterranean market, sailing large resort ships with drinks and speciality dining charged on top. Luxury lines sail much smaller ships at far higher fares with most of that included.

How many ships does Costa Cruises have?

Costa has eight ships, all Italian-flagged, after Costa Fortuna leaves the fleet for Margaritaville at Sea. The count matters less than the split: two LNG mega-ships, five ships of around 3,800 guests and one small ship of about 2,260.

What is the drinking age on a Costa cruise?

The drinking age is 18 on departures outside the United States and 21 on US departures. The same age rules apply to the drinks packages.

Does Costa charge for Wi-Fi?

Yes, Wi-Fi isn’t included in any fare. It’s sold separately in WhatsApp, Social and Full tiers on a Starlink connection, so budget for it in the extras column alongside drinks and excursions.

Can I leave a nappy-wearing toddler at the Squok Club?

No, the club is for children who are already out of nappies, and it’s a club rather than a nursery. Under-3s use the Squok Baby Area, which on the two LNG ships also takes children under six alongside a family restaurant.