Selbourne

The one positive thing is that we have had personalised letters, exactly as per the wording you describe, within hours of each missed port call.

Spot on. On most of our previous cruises the Captains have been just like that. This one is very different. You get told the bare minimum and nothing else. I have genuinely lost count of how many comments I have heard about the scant communication from this Captain. On another (far more popular) site that I don’t use but someone showed me, where there are hundreds of people on this cruise, a moderator who is extremely pro P&O was defending something but ended with “however, I agree that the communication from the Captain has been abysmal”. The best and funniest quote that I heard was yesterday. Someone said “This is the first cruise I’ve been on where the Captain is working from home” 🤣

Yes I believe that’s a factor and probably why we needed the tug that P&O / Carnival refused to pay for. Sadly I think they suffer from “we always know best” syndrome. Keep in mind that any unpopular changes are always trumpeted as “in response to customer feedback” 🤔

Day 49 - Tuesday 20th February - Cozumel, Mexico I’d had a poor nights sleep, not because of my throat but because I never sleep well when I have to be up early - even when I’ve set an alarm. The cabin air con was back on a ‘go slow’ at night as well. For some bizarre reason, although my tour was only three and a half hours long, it was due to leave at 8am. We had been warned that it’s a long walk to get clear of the terminal so to allow 15 minutes, plus many tours seem to leave a bit early, so I was up at 6.20am. If I am on a morning tour I have to allow enough time to ensure that my wife is up and about before I go as I often have to assist her to get out of the bed (it’s too low) and to get ready. I had showered, applied sun cream and the foul smelling Jungle Formula (the excursion was to Mayan ruins in a jungle) and my wife was in the shower when the captain came on the airwaves to say that due to wind the port call was cancelled. Obviously we have to take his word for it that this was the case and that our safety is his biggest concern etc etc. I know that people like to criticise ‘armchair admirals’ but it’s no wonder that people question these things on days like this. Clear blue sky, calm sea, no discernible wind at all (weather site confirmed 10 mph) and every other ship due to berth in Cozumel got in no problem - including the much larger ones that supposed to have difficulties in wind due to their high sides. We had exactly the same with Key West. Barely a breath of wind and calm seas. It doesn’t say a lot for Aurora’s capabilities in comparison to other ships when she falls at the first hurdle like this. Anyway, the decision had been made and so, in spite of having been up at an ungodly hour, we now have an unplanned sea day with nothing to do. I had a second shower before breakfast to try to rid myself of the jungle formula smell! The entertainment manager announced that tonight’s show had to be changed as Jon Clegg, comedy impressionist (Britain’s Got Talent finalist) had been due to board in Cozumel, so the female singer from a few nights back would do her second show tonight. We also learned later that a passenger was due to be medically offloaded in Cozumel (hospital arranged etc) and obviously is now stuck on here for 2 more days until Grand Cayman. Mid morning I picked up the revised ‘entertainment’ schedule just in time to see that there was a port talk at 1130 on Tortola and St Kitts, so we attended that. We contemplated lunch in the Glasshouse but noticed that the lunch menu in the MDR didn’t look too bad so we went there instead. We spent the afternoon reading, making our daily visit to Raffles and a few laps of the promenade deck. That was it. Relaxing but dull and not what we cruise for. Thanks to my WiFi package (which incidentally has been great and extremely reliable throughout the cruise) I was also able to attend to some domestic admin. I’m relieved that I won’t have a backlog to deal with when we get home, other than those who persist with snail mail. In an idle moment whilst waiting for a lift for an unusually long time, I discovered why the stairwells are so ruddy hot and how easy it would be to fix it. I was stood directly under one of the ceiling lights and could feel the heat coming off it. I put my hand up and couldn’t touch the bulb it was so hot. Surely it would not be beyond the wit of man (or even P&O) to replace all these bulbs with LED ones that don’t generate any heat? The same with the ceiling bulbs in the lifts. Everyone comments on the heat in these areas and it seems like an obvious fix to me! This is the sort of nonsense that I’m driven to on boring sea days 😂 The revised 10pm theatre show was Sammy Lomax ‘The Happy Playlist’. Her first show had been Dusty Springfield, but tonight was a mix of artists. If you can ignore the fact that the patter between songs was at times a lot longer than the songs themselves, she put on a good show. She certainly has a great voice and even well known songs that she did a different interpretation of were very well delivered. Certainly an entirely different league from the lead female singer in Pulse, who can manage to murder most songs. Tomorrow we have another sea day.

It’s true we will never be told the truth. P&O sadly have form with telling blatant lies about why ports are missed, as I discovered some years ago by doing some investigative work on why a fjords cruise became a coastal towns cruise. They blamed the port making the change when in fact it was as a direct result of a Carnival instruction to cancel the P&O slot to make way for a Cunard ship. I’ve heard today on fairly good authority that Key West was cancelled as the port was demanding £29,000 for the use of a tug and P&O refused to pay it, presumably as it wasn’t a budgeted cost. If true, it’s a classic example of ‘sod the customers, we won’t have to reimburse them so have nothing to lose and everything to gain by just cancelling the port call’.

Someone we spoke to earlier had a list of 5 ships that had made it in and one that looked like it might be tendering. Certainly 6 other ships were due in to Cozumel today in addition to Aurora.

Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I’m doing, although I might be tempted by the banana and pecan nuts in toffee sauce (assuming that they can make a toffee sauce that tastes of toffee) 🤔😂

Exactly. Even if we are to take what we were told as gospel (which, BTW, nobody that we’ve spoken to today does), then it doesn’t say much for Aurora that she cannot cope in such mild conditions. Everyone understands that these issues can happen if the weather is really bad but today, as with Key West, it’s been a glorious day with calm seas. The sea state picked up a bit this afternoon but of course we are now well away from Cozumel.

Apparently yes. There’s just one flaw in that argument though in terms of how it relates to today. The sea was extremely calm and there was no discernible wind (and we were in sight of the terminal). I can’t help but think that a different captain might have made a different decision. Same with Key West. Pilots advise but Captains decide (except in the Panama Canal, as we learned last week). Of course, the expression ‘in agreement with the local pilot and consultation with shoreside colleagues’ may simply mean that the Captain made the decision as the others can’t overrule him 🤔

Yes, there’s a lot of that. The same item appears in identical, or very similar form, across lunch and dinner within a 24 hour period. As menus are planned in advance, they obviously allow for that to be the case. Never noticed it before this cruise. Perhaps it’s to do with this new trial that a few have mentioned is happening on Aurora?

Thanks. I knew it wasn’t much, especially when just one missed port nets a couple £300. I can’t see how they can do it for that price in all honesty. Seems like they couldn’t!

Today’s MDR menus. They obviously didn’t get rid of all the summer puddings at dinner last night as the leftover ones are on todays lunch menu (this happens a lot)!

No idea. I’m happy with the compensation we will get from our insurers, but feel sorry for those who don’t have missed port cover or those for whom Cozumel was a highlight of the itinerary (in all honesty, it wasn’t for us, although, as with Key West, I’d much rather have called there than have another sea day).

Presumably this will only take effect from the members next annual renewal, as we have recently paid the supplements for 12 months cover? I’m not surprised that the cruise add on is changing. We paid a ridiculously small supplement for cruise cover (no more than £30 from memory) and already have £600 in missed port claims.

The trouble when you are given such scant official information is that theories fill the void that’s been created!

That’s very interesting. I’ve lost count of how many missed ports we’ve had with P&O over the years and we’ve never had a bean from them (not even a green one 😂). This is the first cruise where we’ve ever had missed port cover and the payouts so far will be 50% more than the entire annual insurance policy cost but, of course, none of that is from P&O.

Can’t say that I’m surprised to hear that all other ships got in OK, yet it’s supposed to be the bigger ships that struggle more in wind as their high sides act as sails 🤔. The irony was that it’s a sunny day with calm seas and no winds of any significance that I could detect from my foray outdoors. We obviously have no choice but to accept that the Captain makes the right decision based on safety, but I sometimes wonder whether the same decision would be made if there was a financial consequence for P&O for missed ports. I appreciate that they probably still have to pay the port fees and also have to refund excursions, but the additional on board spend with everyone being stuck on the ship for the day probably means that they don’t lose out - and may even gain. It's never sat easy with me that passengers have to rely purely on whether or not they have missed port cover to get any compensation for missed ports and cruise companies have no liability. Land based companies would struggle to get away with failing to provide an advertised service and saying ‘nothing to do with us - contact your insurers’.

Cozumel Cancelled The captain has just announced that, due to high winds, we are unable to berth in Cozumel today and the visit is cancelled. No replacement port so a sea day. Its blue sky and flat calm seas, but why do I know! I was booked on a tour this morning that left very early, so I didn’t have a good nights sleep (never do if I have to be up early), got up at 6.15am and dragged my wife out of bed soon after. Worst of all, in addition to the sun cream I am covered in that vile smelling Jungle Formula spray, so now need to go and have another shower to try to lessen the stench 😂 On the positive side, as well as a refund for the excursion that’s another £300 missed port insurance claim, now making £600 with Key West.

I wondered the same Avril. I’m sure that they’ve always worked to a budget for food and that budget may well be the same, or even more than pre Covid but, as we all know, food costs have rocketed so you get a lot less for your money these days. The thing that I’m struggling with though is that having read about all the post Covid cutbacks, we were apprehensive about our cruises last year, yet found the MDR food to, in the main, be very good on Britannia, Iona and Ventura. Aurora hasn’t been as good for some reason. The choice doesn’t worry me too much - I can usually find something I’m happy with - but sauces and gravies lack flavour, food doesn’t seem to be seasoned and stated components are often missed or so small that they might as well not be there (I do wonder whether the fact that we are second sitting is a factor in this). We get the odd very good meal but most are forgettable. I wouldn’t have thought that the Executive Chef made that much difference, but it’s someone I’ve never heard of before so I do wonder.

Day 48 - Monday 19th February - Costa Maya, Mexico We had a good nights sleep, primarily because the air con in our cabin behaved itself for once and we didn’t wake up hot during the night as we often do. The negative aspect of this was that we missed breakfast as last admission is 9am. Had it been 9.30am, as it is on some other P&O ships on port days, we would have been OK. When we were ready to go ashore we thought that we would get the Britain Yesterday paper and photograph the MDR menus on our way off the ship, but as we left our cabin there was an announcement saying that due to another cruise ship about to berth, disembarkation would be suspended in 10 minutes time. We got caught up with that nonsense in Puerto Rico, when we were held outside the cruise terminal for well over half an hour, so we whizzed off the ship PDQ. We walked down a long pier to the cruise village that is Costa Maya. This is a large resort style place with a small beach, swimming pools and loads of shops. It’s quite well done but it’s very much like a Disney interpretation of Mexico rather than the real thing. We had decided to try to see proper Mexico and wanted to go to Mahahual which is the nearest town (also a beach resort). This was easier said than done. Costa Maya cruise village has two problems. Firstly, it’s very busy and congested. Secondly it’s like a maze and nigh on impossible to find your way around, so it took ages to find our way out! As we left the terminal we were approached by countless cab drivers, and because we had felt that in most places we had been to the fares were a rip off we ignored them. This turned out to be a mistake as I will explain. As we cleared the cab area we got to a roundabout and there was no sign as to whether the town was left or right. A chap from the ship said that he’d been to the right and there wasn’t anything much down there, so we went left. We then saw a booth with a chap in it who gave us a little map and told us how to get to Mahahual which he described as being a ‘20 minute walk’. Off we went and I’m calling BS on that, because it was more like 45 minutes. Some very kind passengers from the ship who were also walking offered to assist with pushing the wheelchair but I was OK. However, I had foolishly not had anything whatsoever to eat or drink since the night before and didn’t even have water with me. Eventually we got to Mahahual and thankfully it was worth it. Quite a nice beach resort and far more authentic than the cruise resort, although all the vendors were still as pushy inviting us into the their shops etc. At this point we had discovered from other passengers who had got a cab there that it had only cost them $4 a head! They couldn’t believe that we had walked all the way there! After a good look around we got a cab back. The driver was very good helping me get my wife in and out of the car, so rather than the $8 fare, and because I was so relived not to have had to walk all the way back, I gave him $15 thinking that was still a damned good deal! Unfortunately, when we got back on the ship I realised that If left my sun hat on the seat in the back of the cab! We were both starving and thirsty so went to the MDR for lunch, which thankfully was one of the better lunches we have had there. After lunch had gone down I decided to go back off the ship and have a better look around the Costa Maya cruise resort, but I think I timed it badly as a mega ship had just arrived and thousands of passengers were streaming off and all going where I was going. As often happens when these huge ships arrive, places get swamped and this was no exception. I had as good a look around as I could and tried to find a sun hat, but they all had Costa Maya or American football or baseball teams on them and neither appealed! In the end, after returning to the ship, having a rest and watching the sail away, I bought a hat from the on board shop! At dinner, I fancied the chicken fajitas but our assistant waiter had put me off by saying that the tortilla wraps were vegan ones. I’d had some tortilla wraps for lunch one day that had been revolting, so I assumed it was those. Anyway, as I didn’t particularly fancy anything else I chose them and was glad I did. The tortilla wraps were actually two tiny things that together wouldn’t have even made one wrap, but they were different to the ones I’d had before and, as a result, were edible. More to the point, the chicken and fillings were lovely, so I ended up enjoying it. The starter had been pretty good and only the dessert was poor so, overall, not a bad result given how patchy the MDR is. The 10pm show (a female singer) didn’t appeal so we called it a night. I have an early start tomorrow with an 8am excursion (no idea why it has to leave so damned early when it’s only three and a half hours long). Cozumel will be our last stop in Central America before we commence our second lap of various Caribbean islands.

I was initially pleased to see that we have chicken fajitas tonight, until our assistant waiter told me that the tortillas that come with them are vegan ones. I had those earlier in the cruise and they were absolutely disgusting. Inedible in fact. I don’t mind repetition and on a cruise of this length you expect it, but things can repeat 2 consecutive days, or just be a very slight variation. Happens a lot with mains and desserts. Smacks of ‘we didn’t use it all up yesterday so we’ll try again today’. Then you have the added issue that whilst the menus might sound very tempting, what you end up with a lot of the time is a big anti climax and doesn’t live up to the glamorous descriptions. We are still sticking with our assessment that only 20% of MDR meals are ‘good’, 20% are ‘poor’ and 60% are mediocre. I appreciate that it’s mass catering, but if you were served up a lot of these meals in a restaurant at home you wouldn’t be putting the place on your favourites list. It’s a shame as we know that it can be done so much better - including on P&O. As stated, we found the MDR food to be far superior on all the other P&O ships we went on last year (Britannia, Iona and Ventura).

Todays MDR menus

My wife had the steak last night. The steak came with chips, a flavourless and watery mushroom sauce and………green beans 🙄😂

We are now alongside in Costa Maya. Sea very calm.