Originally Posted by
747FC
They have/had ships from 2k passengers and much more. In the earlier days of my cruising, I was on three cruises with them. Our general perspective was that the staff exerted little control over passengers who clearly needed structure. There was a laissez faire attitude amongst the staff with respect to passenger misbehavior. Many of the staff seemed incompetent, leading us to stop cruising with them even before the Concordia disaster.
Although Italian culture and society seems a bit unorganised and chaotic (*), I imagine it is poor leadership/mgmt somewhere at Costa that allowed all the unfortunate events to happen. Only been on a few larger Italian-crewed boats (assorted Corsica Ferries, Saremar and Tirrenia ships) and captained (Celebrity Millennium) and nothing short of fairly-efficient and safe operation.
* - Hence the joke about hell being organised by the Italian heaven by the Swiss).