terrierjohn

I am very surprised you got served drinks anyway, coffee, water and orange juice are normally self service.

How do you manage to cram 6 hours leisurely activity into the 2 hours you get with a 4:00pm embarkation time?

But your so well known on P&O Dai that none of the staff would ever want to upset you, so you always get preferential treatment.😉😇

People are always eager to start their holiday ASAP, before we were Baltic we always arrived early. That way we had time to have a light lunch and would hope our luggage had arrived so we could unpack before the old muster drill. Perhaps now with there being no muster drill, the pressure might be a little less, but having the time to wander around and get your bearings for those new to the ship, must still be a major attraction.

You are stressing yourself unnecessarily, there should still be time to book venues even if you dont board till 4:00 pm. However I doubt there will be much of a queue so late in the day, so maybe aim to arrive a little after 3, and if you explain that you cant stand for long they will probably let you wait in the downstairs area which should enable you to log on to the ships app using the last 6 numbers on your boarding pass.

Not until he is back though.

It might be worth asking your TA if it would be cheaper to change it in 2 steps, the transfer fee for two changes may be less than losing your deposit. But you need to be certain that would be allowed.

You need to read clause 15 of the T&Cs, anything over 12 months will be treated as a cancellation and new booking.

There is a free launderette on board with irons and ironing boards, if you are prepared to do your own laundry.

There are no e-tickets anymore, you print off a boarding pass which will show priority boarding on it, if you are Caribbean or a above, or a suite passenger.

I suspect the issue is port workers and pilot availability, if they are not prepared to work overtime, then there is no way any ship can safely leave port.

Of course it might be that there is another ship due in Liverpool the day before, so that an overnight is not possible.

No we hardly ever queued at City Terminal with Celebrity or Royal Caribbean, even on Indy during summer holidays with well over 4000 passengers, and Princess which uses the same terminals as P&0. I am guessing that the main reason is that all 3 of the above manage to disembark their old passenger faster than P&O, and start boarding the new ones at 10:30-11:00am, rather than Noon as P&O do.

I wonder why you think that would happen with P&O when it doesn't seem to happen with most other cruise lines sailing from Southamoton?

I think you can have overlapping food and entertainment bookings though, which should also be prohibited.

The NHS now do offer a shingles vaccination for over 70s, so I imagine that even having had chickenpox you could still get shingles if you come in contact with the virus.

As a point of interest I wonder how Saga do handle the shared transport for wheelchair passengers who cannot climb minibus steps. My wife can transfer to a passenger side seat in a standard car but could not board any MPV type vehicle with stepped entry.

Now hang on a minute, as a follicly challenged old geezer, I find a baseball cap very useful for avoiding sunstroke, and they look far better than most mens sun hats.

Princess use the Carnival terminals of Ocean, Maylower or QE2, so their staff will be the same. Celebrity and Royal Caribbean use City Terminal, so probably different since they have ships in port at the same time as P&O

It's not children splashing water over the edge of the pool that causes the problem on the aft balconies, that falls harmlessly into the trough without any problem. Unfortunately there is a constant flow of water from the gap in the bottom of the perspex/glass see through panel. In normal seas this usually hits the trough towards the bottom without any problem and runs smoothly down and is recycled back to the pool. However when there is any swell the water flows backwards and forwards with varying force and at its strongest it forces the water through the gap in the base of the panel which then hits the sloping trough wall with force which results in the splashing. Unfortunately I doubt that reducing the water level in the pool will have much effect on the splashing because there will still be sufficient force from any waves to have a very similar effect. Possibly a redesigned or higher trough wall might reduce the splashing, but I imagine that could only be done during a dry dock.

+1

Strangely we never experienced long queues on Celebrity, Royal Caribbean or Princess from Southampton, and all 3 lines allow passengers to set their own time of arrival, and we frequently arrived at different times to our predicted arrival, so I guess others possibly arrived at a different time. It appears that only P&O have problems with handling embarkation to everyones satisfaction. Of course it could be due to P&O not dealing with a speedy disembarcation, thus only starting embarkation around noon, instead of 10:30-11:00am like the others.

Do many posters on here look at the UK Cruisers board, certainly it would never occur to me to post there.

Not sure which deck has the galley, but I would imagine that deck will have faster service.

I guess that only those with a gty booking will want to bother with this procedure, anyone booking a select fare probably won't want to risk ending up in a dodgy location.