Costa returns to Malta

Costa Cruises shall start calling at Valletta again following its decision to drop visits last year.

The decision to reinstate calls to Malta followed lengthy negotiations between local travel company Orange Cruises Ltd, formerly Cruises International Ltd, and Costa Cruises.

The ship designated to operate the service, the Costa Concordia, can carry up to 3,800 passengers and is scheduled to make 32 calls between April 15 and November 18, bringing more than 100,000 passengers.

The talks between Orange and Costa started after several past clients enquired about Costa offering cruises out of Valletta – as the line had been doing for most of the past decade.

Due to the size of the multi-million Euro deal, Orange has managed to negotiate the lowest prices ever offered by Costa on any of its ships departing out of Valletta, even drastically reducing prices on what the Concordia offered for Malta-based cruises a couple of years back.

Orange plans to sell cruises out of Valletta not only to Maltese holidaymakers, but also to other markets – especially the UK, Turkey, Cyprus and Ukraine where it operates its own offices.