Cruise families offered £9,000, but lawyers go for 100 times more cash

Costa Crociere SpA has said it will pay £9,200 each to more than 3,000 passengers who were on board the ship when it ran aground off Tuscany after the captain deviated from his route.

Sixteen bodies have been recovered and 16 people are missing, presumed dead.

The company, a unit of the world’s biggest cruise operator, the Miami-based Carnival Corp, also said it would reimburse passengers the full costs of their cruise, their travel expenses and any medical expenses sustained after the grounding.

The deal does not apply to the hundreds of crew on the ship and the roughly 100 cases of people injured or the families who lost loved ones.

The agreement was announced after negotiations between Costa representatives and Italian consumer groups, who say they represent 3,206 cruise ship passengers from 61 countries who suffered no physical harm when the Costa Concordia hit a reef on 13 January.

Passengers are free to pursue legal action on their own if they are not satisfied with the deal. Some consumer groups have already signed on as injured parties in the criminal case against the Concordia’s captain, Francesco Schettino, who is accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all passengers were evacuated. He is under house arrest.

Claudia Urru, of Cagliari, Sardinia, who was on board the ship with her husband and two sons aged three and 12, said her elder child was seeing a psychiatrist. He would not speak about the disaster or even look at television footage of the grounding.

She said: “He’s terrorised at night. He can’t go to the bathroom alone. We’re all sleeping together, except my husband, who has gone into another room because we don’t all fit.”

As a result, she said, her family has retained a lawyer because they do not know what the real impact – financial or otherwise – of the trauma will be. We are having a very, very hard time.”

Codacons, one of Italy’s best-known consumer groups, has engaged two US law firms to launch a class-action lawsuit against Costa and Carnival in Miami, claiming that it expects to get anywhere from £104,000 to £840,000 per passenger. That top-end figure would be almost 100 times the current offer.

Codacons has also called for a criminal investigation into the practice of steering huge cruise ships close to shore to give passengers and residents on land a bit of a thrill.

The chief executive of Costa, Pier Luigi Foschi, told an Italian parliamentary committee that so-called “tourist navigation” was not illegal, and was a “cruise product” sought out by passengers and offered by cruise lines to try to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, a crew member has filed a lawsuit in Chicago federal court against Carnival Cruise Lines and its Costa subsidiary.

The lawsuit seeks to represent all 4,200 passengers and crew on board. It was filed on behalf of crew member Gary Lobaton, who is from Peru.

The lawsuit accuses Carnival and Costa of negligence because of an unsafe evacuation after the accident occurred. Neither company would comment about lawsuits yesterday.

Search efforts for the missing have resumed.

Passengers have said the evacuation was chaotic. Coast guard data shows the captain only sounded the evacuation alarm an hour after the initial collision, well after the Concordia had listed to the point that many lifeboats could not be lowered.

Capt Schettino has admitted he had taken the ship on “touristic navigation”, but has said the rocks he hit were not charted on his nautical maps.