Well as the day as passed the itinerary saga has continued with lots of stories being passed around by just about everybody. In a note delivered with the daily programme we have some sort of explanation for not stopping at the last two ports. It reads as follows…….
Dear Guests
We would like to inform you that due to a technical issue we are not able to sail at full speed and in order to assure our northbound cruise arrival at the port of Savona on time, we therefore unfortunately need to cancel our next port of call at Naples.
The inconvenience does not impact on the full safety conditions of our cruise, but just reduces the speed.
We are now heading to Savona with an estimated arrival time of 10:00am on Tuesday 15th April.
Those guests who were to disembark in Naples will be fully assisted and transferred to Naples by a dedicated charter flight which will leave Genoa airport at 2:00pm on the same day (Tues 15th).
In order to mitigate the discomfort caused by the route change, guests on board the Costa Fortuna are offered a credit of €100 (per cabin) to their onboard account.
We thank you for your understanding.
It would also appear there are a quite a few Italians & Germans still not happy with this and have demanded a meeting with the Captain and if everything I hear is to be believed then the shows in the theatre didn’t go ahead last night because 30 or so Italian passengers interrupted the performances by having a sit in on the stage to protest! You really couldn’t make it up could you?
All said though, I am slightly bothered by how we could have lost so much time. The daily programme had suggested that the Suez transit ranges from 11 to 14 hours depending on traffic coming the other way. They must have built the worst case scenario into the itinerary and if my observations were accurate then we started the transit 2 hours late and it took us 11 hours. I believe that put us more or less where we should have been at Port Said. The first we knew of any change to the itinerary was when it was when it was announced during the canal transit that Heraklion had been cancelled due to time loss? How could they have known that then?
We then proceeded into the Mediterranean doing 17-18 knots which isn’t that slow and have continued to do so ever since apart from when we did the emergency evacuation where we lost about an hour. This ship has a top speed of 22 knots so I think there is something they are just not telling us. OK, they could just about get away with saying one port needed to be dropped but two? We were due to be in Naples for 6 hours and Heraklion for 4.
Could it be the cost of having 2 tugs in attendance through the canal has cost too much and to try and recapture some of the overspend they have dropped 2 ports? But then why go to all the extra effort to get disembarking passengers back to Naples?
Some fellow passengers we have spoken to said that there were rumours that the decision to drop Naples had been circulating as early as yesterday morning. In the afternoon the navigational maps were altered without any official announcement, this eventually came over the tanoy at around 5:30pm. I don’t think the whole episode has been handled very professionally and its no wonder so many passengers are upset.
I guess we will never know the full story.
However as a final note I would be curious to know where MSC Lirica is in comparison to our location as she was only 2 hours ahead of us going into the Suez canal.
This is the view from our balcony clearly showing only one of the props working fully