Costa Cruises just started sailing their first purpose built ship for China.
Before we begin looking at her public areas, first some background. Carnival Corp designs ships for multi-brand deployment. The Venezia is part of the Vista-class of ships. She joins her sisters, Carnival Vista and Carnival Horizon. You can take a detailed tour of the Horizon here. The Venezia is technically 2,000gt larger than her sisters, with the Venezia coming in at 135,000gt. If you’re interested in her Chinese name it’s 歌诗达邮轮威尼斯号.
There’s no question that ships that are intended for the Chinese cruise market are different than their western hemisphere counterparts. When NCL or Princess send their latest mega-ship over there, they enlarge certain areas (casino) and scale back others (main pool and lido). The same is done here on the Costa Venezia but what’s unique about here is they take the ships theme to the extreme.
VIEW COSTA VENEZIA DECK PLANS
The overall theme of the vessel is the city of Venice. Venezia gets her name from venice after all. Costa ships also tend to be a bit more colorful and bolder than their Carnival and Holland America counterparts. This ship takes it’s overall decor to the extreme. There is no better example of this than the dining room. The left is the Carnival Vista and the right is the Venezia.
Amidships is the main atrium, Piazza San Marco. Lot’s of gold’s and blues.
Towards the front is the main theater styled like a Venetian theater. On Venezia it’s called Teatro Rosso.
Similar to the Havana concept on the Carnival versions, here we have the Lounge Delle Stelle. The entrance has life-size action film-star mannequins.
As we head further up to the Lanai deck, another Venetian themed venue is the Gondola lounge. More blue and gold.
A new venue found on the same deck are the Calle Larga Boutiques. This is where the brewery restaurant is typically found on the CCL vessels. Calle Larga are high end shopping boutiques.
There’s also new restaurants added to this deck for the purpose of the local clientele. There’s a Hot Pot, Teppanyaki, and a smaller Italian and steakhouse.
Then above deck, the pool area has also been changed up a bit. It now features a glass dome.
Lastly just to give you a glimpse of the cabins, here’s some stock photos from Costa covering the 4 main cabin types.
