Selbourne

Whether we were just unlucky I don’t know, but certainly our two P&O cruises so far this year (Britannia & Iona) were extremely disappointing when it came to guest speakers, certainly compared to what we were used to pre Covid. By contrast, our Cunard cruise was significantly better in that regard. I shall be interested to see what it’s like on Ventura in a few weeks time, as we have 3 sea days in a row at the start of the cruise and without decent guest speakers I shall be bored rigid 😂

Although, more often than not, they are allocated passenger cabins that, with less speakers, can be sold to fare paying passengers!

Ah, I see. So this was a ‘test’ for us to see what we’d say, as you actually got up the Empire State Building after all 😂 I had wondered why you hadn’t just gone there independently, but didn’t want to rub salt in the wound, hence my advice if you managed to go there again! I’m delighted to hear that you did and suspect that others are gutted that they didn’t do the same as you. Whilst I had been to New York on business (I had been at the top of the World Trade Centre 2 weeks before 9/11 😱), my wife had never been and it would be a one-off visit for her so, like you, I was absolutely determined that she would see all the highlights. Now that I know that you’ve been up there I will post some photos of our nighttime view and also some daytime ones from Top of the Rock.

I’m sorry to hear that you had such a poor cruise. What a difference a few months makes. We were on Britannia in July and we enjoyed all the food in the MDR, other than the Celebration night (the Marco Pierre White dishes were poor). Neither of us are vegetarian or vegan either. I love lamb and unfortunately didn’t see it on the menu once, but we ate in the speciality restaurants around half the nights. I had lamb in Sindhu but didn’t particularly enjoy it. I prefer mint sauce on my lamb to whatever they had cooked it in! Luckily we’ve never had food poisoning or Norovirus on any of our 20+ P&O cruises, but we’ve put that down to avoiding the buffet 😂 We thought that the ship looked in very good condition back in July, but someone on the cruise after ours reported on similar things to you. Odd we didn’t notice them though. So sorry to hear that you got Covid to top off all your problems. We are having our boosters next week (2 weeks before our next cruise) as I’m conscious that Covid and cruise ships are very happy bed fellows, especially in the cooler months.

Yes it does. Many thanks. If anything in next weeks release takes our interest I might hold fire until we are on board Ventura in 3 weeks time.

Just in case you haven’t had the email yet, online check-in has opened today 👍

Sounds fabulous. Enjoy!

Nice one! Do you happen to know how the £530pp compared to what was offered generally? Just trying to get a sense of how much benefit there is booking on board versus booking from home. Until last week, many cruises had whopping amounts of OBC on offer but, in usual P&O style, in many cases it seemed to be associated with a high cruise price. I always work out the net cost of cruise price less OBC and in the past have found that it’s either low cruise price with no OBC, or high cruise price with high OBC - net result roughly the same! However, things seem to be changing now, so I’ve started keeping a log of net cruise prices for a selection of cruises from launch, which I will revisit every few months under different offers, to see when the optimum time to book is, although I suspect that it will vary considerably by cruise and ship!

I was aware of rail companies being shored up by the tax payer during the pandemic, but not cruise companies. I’d be surprised if U.K. tax payers money was used to help US owned cruise companies which most, including P&O, are?

I suspect that the 25/30 year timeframe relates to how long P&O would keep a ship. As you say, many other lines don’t even take them on until they are about that age!

There were some pretty big OBC deals recently. If you booked on board, did you get more again?

Yep, same one as you. Also looking forward to it. Haven’t been on Ventura since 2017. Just hoping that the MDR food is better than some of the reviews are suggesting. We certainly had no complaints with the MDR food on Britannia or Iona this year.

Greetings! I can’t recall whether or not you need an accessible cabin, but I have a funny feeling that the one time that we enquired about some cruises onboard they weren’t able to confirm availability of accessible cabins. Do you happen to know? Maybe that’s changed as it was some years ago?

I think I’ve read that the £50 deposit onboard offer is no more, but would be grateful if someone can confirm. Failing that, we are on Ventura in a few weeks so will check then, although I rarely if ever visit the future cruise desks, as they seem to be open very short hours and when they are open there always seems to be queues - and I don’t do queues 😂. Even £100 pp is pretty good though, as I’d be happy to write that off if our circumstances changed. My wife has a worsening disability and it’s quite a gamble for us to book 2 years out, but as we need an accessible balcony cabin we sometimes have to do so. Also, with just £200 down it would be easy to cancel and re-book if the price drops. The days of launch prices never being beaten thereafter seem to have ended.

I agree. Whilst some people happily cruise on all the ships, the adult only ships are generally catering for a different demographic to the likes of Iona and Arvia, so to lose them would see off a lot of P&O customers. That being said, without considerable investment (highly unlikely) I’m not sure how much longer P&O can continue to justify the often substantial price premiums that these ships still seem to carry, in spite of being quite dated. We’ve done more cruises on Aurora than any other ship but, having experienced the far better quality cabins and facilities on the newer ships, we are struggling to convince ourselves that we are still prepared to pay the sort of premium prices still commanded for Aurora and Arcadia, especially as that bumps them into Cunard territory. What P&O calls a refit is generally running mechanical repairs to meet regulations and minor interior changes, such as carpets and furnishings. I guess that the tipping point will be when either ship is approaching the need for substantial work that is deemed uneconomical. Anybody’s guess when that will be, but my hunch is that they will still be around for a few years to come.

I’m so sorry to hear this. It’s not just about the cost of the trip but the fact that this would have been the highlight of the New York call for many people. Hopefully you might receive something in addition to a straight refund to reflect this. If you get chance to go there again, New York is dead easy to do DIY. When we went there on Aurora I booked the very first excursion to leave the ship (World Trade Centre memorial & 9/11 museum), partly because it was the furthest place that we wanted to go and also because I had heard that it could take hours to be cleared to disembark and get through passport control, and I knew that the first tours would get fast tracked. The plan worked brilliantly, as we were first off the ship and when we returned to the ship hours later people were still waiting to disembark. We didn’t go back on the ship but carried on around the city independently. I had pre booked everything online from home both to guarantee admission and to bypass queues, so that we maximised our time. After the tour, on the first evening we did a river cruise (to see Manhattan & Statue of Liberty at night), Time Square, Grand Central, Broadway and the Empire State Building (there’s a number you can call where they tell you what the visibility is like before you commit to go up, so we timed it to have a clear view). On the second day we did Central Park, 5th Avenue, Rockefeller Plaza, Top of the Rock (so we had a daytime skyscraper view to contrast the nighttime view) and the whole length of the Skyline lower Manhattan elevated walkway (both ways) - all on foot and with no cabs, whilst pushing my wife in her wheelchair the whole time! I realise that not everyone is as adventurous, but I can honestly say that we never once felt threatened. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we felt safer walking around New York, even at night, than we would in most U.K. cities. Returning to your question, if you email P&O and express your disappointment I would hope that you might get something beyond a straight refund. I did this recently about some problems that we experienced on Iona (it wasn't really a complaint, more feedback) and I received a call from them apologising and we have received an additional £500 OBC for our next cruise as a result. Good luck.

It might be worth giving them one last try before you write them off Harry. I was probably in the same place as you until July. Having not cruised since the end of 2019 (the staycation cruises not remotely appealing to us), I had read countless reviews concerning all the cutbacks and was coming to the view that that P&O had become too much of a budget operator for us. We already had a couple of P&O cruises due (booked at launch a few years back) but weren’t looking forward to them due to all that we were reading. I decided to nip this in the bud by booking a short notice cruise on Britannia in July at an excellent price (amazingly, we managed to get an accessible balcony cabin). We went with low expectations, but it was a ‘filler’ holiday and if it wasn’t on a par with previous cruises it wouldn’t be the end of the world, as the itinerary was good and we had paid very little for it. I don’t know if you followed my live blog, but we enjoyed the cruise. We weren’t going out of our way to look for the cutbacks, but having cruised regularly with P&O over the last 25 years, we couldn’t help but notice them and there were a good couple of dozen things that we picked up on. However, and this is the key thing, in all honesty very few of them had an impact on our enjoyment of the holiday. With most of them, there was a workaround. I did a separate post on this after the cruise. The only one that still sticks in my mind as being a negative that we couldn’t work around was the reduction in guest lecturers. We find sea days to be quite boring (we cruise for the ports and the other cruise ship style ‘entertainment’ doesn’t appeal to us). The other big negative was that Freedom Dining was a bit of a mess at peak times, as the app system doesn’t work when they allow walk ups and use pagers as well. We have changed our Ventura bookings to Club dining as a result (which is a shame, as we prefer Freedom) but ironically Freedom dining worked much better on Iona (where less people avoid using the app as most cruisers are first timers). Other things that we expected to have a problem with we didn’t. I had read countless reports about food in the MDR being poor but, in all honesty, we found it to be fine on both Britannia and Iona. In fact, we had better consistency in the MDR than we did in the (extra cost) specialty restaurants, especially on Britannia. We tried our first Cunard cruise this year and, yes, it was better than P&O but, ordinarily, their prices are quite a bit more, so I guess it’s a case of you get what you pay for. The approach I have taken is that I have lowered the maximum price pppn that I’m now prepared to pay with P&O to a level that I think still offers great value and I am managing to make bookings at or below those prices. Whilst the cheapest cruises are on Iona and Arvia, we are discounting those having tried Iona. Britannia and Ventura are also offering very reasonable prices on some cruises, and they might be the ones for you to give P&O another try before finally deciding to ditch them. We are on Ventura in a few weeks time so I’ll be able to see how that now compares with Britannia. Recent reviews haven’t been good (particularly the MDR) so it will be interesting to see how we find it. Having been 100% loyal to P&O, 50% of our future cruises are now with Cunard. We have also been keen to try Saga, but @Dermotsgirl recent excellent comparison has made me question whether they will be worth paying 3 times the price per night that we are now paying with P&O. So my advice would be to find a low priced cruise that appeals to you (probably on Britannia) and give them a go again. If it confirms your belief that P&O is no longer for you then it hasn’t cost you much to find out. However, like us, you might be pleasantly surprised!

Thanks, but I’d only be prepared to use CPS or P4C and, after our next booking with P4C I think I may even drop them, just leaving CPS. I emailed P4C last week (yet again) about Queen Anne not being on their database and, as before, no reply. In all honesty, if it wasn’t for the fact that they are £100 cheaper than CPS for the 2 weeks that we have booked with them, I think I’d be cancelling the P4C booking. I’ve been happy with P4C when we’ve used them before, but their incompetence when it comes to basic admin is making me feel nervous about leaving an expensive car with them.

We had the email a month before the cruise. We didn’t bid but I think if you do you can hear the outcome at any time up to a few days before. If you travel next week I think it’s safe to assume that you won’t get an option to bid for an upgrade.

The only problem with that is that they won’t then be able to take advantage of the 10% pre booking discount, which on a soft drinks package for two people over the duration of a 14 night cruise would roughly equate to the same additional ‘cost’ that the OP is objecting about!

Exactly the same with us.

The cruises are announced at 0830 on Tuesday 10th October, which is presumably when you can pre-book. I can’t find the dates that you can actually confirm bookings, but hopefully someone else will advise.

I think we all accept that if we want to dine at peak times then we are likely to have to wait and can’t expect to be seated immediately. Personally, I don’t have a problem with that when using the app, as you can join the virtual queue an hour (or whatever) before you want to eat. I preferred that to a pager, as you can at least monitor your progress in the queue so have some vague idea when you might be called (unlike a pager). The frustration for us was more about not even being able to join the virtual queue, as priority was being given to walk-ups and they couldn’t cope with both so set the app to ‘queue full’ (this was on Britannia). I can’t speak for Arvia as we haven’t been on her but, as you say, the problems reported with celebration nights etc seem to be down to the lack of MDR provision. Iona seems to be far better though due, presumably, to the two extra MDRs. We certainly had none of the problems that we’d had on Britannia. I never once saw ‘Queue Full’ for all available MDRs as we had on Britannia for both lunch (on sea days) and dinner.

No, because the fact that so many people are doing what they have always done is precisely the reason why the app isn’t working as designed!

I agree and that is exactly what we witnessed on Britannia. Quite inefficient compared to first come first served. Great when it works but it falls over when it gets very busy.