ECO-FRIENDLY TRAVEL, PART 3

As you can see it was quite windy on deck! 

So we took the Minoan Lines’ Cruise Olympia from Patras, Greece, to Ancona, Italy. As I mentioned in the last post Minoan Lines are awful.

What was so bad? We left an hour late (no announcement) & customer service was generally poor, but the worst element of the short voyage was that there was no internet at all (so since we were at sea that meant NO internet/calls etc) & the swimming pool was closed.

From a climate perspective there was a lot of plastic available (food wrapping, bottles etc) & there seemed to be no effort to restrict its use or remind passengers to be careful & we saw plastic just blowing into the sea.

Worst of all is that we lost even more time on the voyage, arriving 3 hours late. So we missed our train connection in Ancona completely. There were no announcements & whenever we asked crew members for updates they were completely unhelpful.

Nor did they arrange local transport to the station, so we had to run into the town & try to grab a taxi - unsuccessfully until a lovely local lady saw our distress & personally called a taxi for us. THANK YOU LADY! A perfect example of how helpful people often are.

We’re still trying to get a partial refund from Minoan for the tickets for the train that we missed…

And if you think I’m exaggerating about Minoan they have a 1.5 rating on TripAdvisor, from 366 reviews!

By Damien Blackshaw

Damien is the owner of The Real Los Angeles Tours and is on twitter: @damienblackshaw