Cruise Passengers Offered £9,000 Compensation

Passengers aboard the Costa Concordia have been offered �?�11,000 (£9,184) compensation for lost baggage and psychological trauma after the ship deviated from its route, hit a rock and capsized.
Sixteen people died and 16 more are still missing after the ship ran aground near the Italian island of Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany, on January 13.
Costa, owned by the world's biggest cruise operator, Carnival, will also reimburse passengers the full costs of their cruise, travel expenses and any medical expenses sustained after the grounding.
The offer was announced after a day of negotiations between Costa representatives and Italian consumer groups representing 3,206 people from 61 countries who were not hurt physically when the ship hit the reef. 
The deal does not apply to the hundreds of crew on the ship, the roughly 100 cases of people injured or the families who lost loved ones.
The Concordia ran aground and capsized after captain Francesco Schettino veered from his approved course and gashed the ship's hull on a reef, forcing the panicked evacuation of 4,200 passengers and crew. 
On Wednesday, Pier Luigi Foschi, the chief executive of Costa Crociere - the Italian subsidiary of the cruise company -  insisted that Captain Schettino did not have approval to change the ship's routing and was going far too fast - 16 knots - to be so close to shore.
But he defended the practice of so-called "tourist navigation," whereby enormous cruise ships steer close to shore to give passengers a look at the sites.
It was part of the "cruise product" that passengers demanded and that cruise lines are forced to offer to stay competitive, he insisted.
"It's something that enriches the cruise product," Mr Foschi told a parliamentary committee. 
"There are many components of the cruise product, and we have to do them like everyone else because we are in a global competition."
Captain Schettino is under house arrest, facing accusations of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning a ship before all passengers were evacuated.

His lawyer on Wednesday filed a motion challenging the house arrest, saying the ship's captain was not a flight risk and asserting that there was no risk that he would repeat the crime since no cruise line would hire him.