Costa Concordia (Barcelona) January 9 2012. My husband and I are cruising our first Med cruise after numerous North American / Caribbean cruises. I am a little nervous of the January European weather as well as the excursions. I would love to meet English speaking people who would be interested in joining us on private excursions?
Look forward to meeting up with fellow English speaking cruisers.
Andrea, my mom and mother in law are going to be on part of your trip as they will be boarding in Savona....they just don't realize it yet as this is to be their Christmas gift! I assume that you'll be departing the ship in Barcelona as well?
I'm trying to organize a private excursion for them to tour the Provence countryside during the port stop in Marseille. There are companies that offer trips to Arles, Les Baux, and Pont du Gard. If that's something that might interest you I can provide more information and shoot you the website that I was looking at.
And I apologize for my low number of posts on this site....I'm very active (and similarly named) on a similar type site so you can rest assured I'm not a hacker or anything.
Wonderful daughter - great Christmas gift!
I have spent hours trying to decide on excursions. I have been advised to go with Costa excursions for reliability and timing.
What experience have you had. I know little about the ports and find the online information overwhelming. If you can help me to overcome this, we can consider being travel companions.
As for my experience with booking tours, let's just say that I am a seasoned veteran. My husband and I were on a 12 night cruise out of Rome in September and we had a very active roll call. In many ports we had tours arranged by members of the roll call (including myself) at a fraction of the cost -- tours included a visit to the Cinque Terre and Pisa; Pompeii, Positano, and Sorrento; Athens; ancient Olympia and a local winery; etc. I've also cruised extensively in the Caribbean and done similar independent bookings and, as a member of the military, have also done lots of DIYs when pulling into ports for liberty calls.
My issue with ships tours is that they generally are larger, more expensive and provide less than the independent tours that can be arranged. We found this true of every tour that we took on our Med Cruise. Our largest group was 19 (Pompeii, Positano, Sorrento), but our smallest was 4 (Olympia and winery), while most averaged around 10.....most ship's tours appeared to be about 35.
The biggest fear most people have is that the tour operator will not get them back to the ship in time. Believe me, tour operators realize that not getting someone back to the ship would be the death of them as people would post all over cruise sites on the internet. I only deal with reputable tour operators that I've done LOTS of research on in advance to make sure that they are on the up and up.
OK - you have sold yourself as our booking agent but ... where to go? We have not cruised The Med before so I am a little nervous for time but..... have done this a lot in Carabean and have no problem specially if you can recommend to us, how we can make the most of each day. I dont know how much you are willing to gt involed in helping us to make plans but your recommendations would be fantastic. Look forward to hearing your sound advice.
Is this the same Andrea Davis that Kuki refers to in his post with video on the Costa Concordia runs aground off Italy thread? I'm sorry but I don't know how to put Kuki's post from the other thread on this thread.
Last edited by jebbear; January 17th, 2012 at 11:59 AM.
Reason: addition
Just wanted to provide an update to anyone who might be wondering that both Andrea Davis and my moms are alright. Andrea was onboard at the time but has made it home. I talked with her via email today.
My moms were supposed to board in Savona on 1/14. Some news outlets have been mis-reporting the actual course of the ship...she had left Civitavecchia enroute to Savona (not the other way around) and my mom and mom-in-law were in Italy and would have boarded that day. They changed their flight and returned home on Monday.
I only just noticed all the communication going on, on this thread.
Thanks to all for your concern. Yes, this truly was an unbelievably frightening experience. Thank God, both my husband and I managed to swim across to the Island of Giglio, hours after the accident when we realized that there was no other chance of survival for us.
This has been an extremely difficult and emotional period for us.
As we approach 6 months after this accident, we have recently decided to return to Italy where we will retract our journey of survival and visit briefly with all the amazing people along the way who were influential in helping us to get home and reunite with our dear family and friends.
This is both very exciting and mostly tumultuous.
We will return home via Amsterdam where we will be cruising Paris, Brussels, and the Norwegian Fjords. Along the way, we will be reuniting with a dear friend who we met on the Costa Concordia and were together with at the time of this accident.
Afraid and nervous, we will sail away on Friday July 13th ..
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Costa Concordia (Barcelona) January 9 2012
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