jh1809

I spoke too soon, as yesterday I had duplicate emails for one of my two 2024 cruises and also for my 2025 cruise.

It might be worth my while checking again for my Arcadia cruise departing on Tuesday then, just in case it's a fleet-wide change that P&O haven't bothered to announce.

I don't remember ever receiving such an email and I'm 74.

I doubt that it's an IT problem, as unless my memory is seriously at fault I was able to pre-book restaurants on the cruise personaliser in the year or two before Covid. Indeed, for my Northern Lights cruise on Aurora in March 2020 - which left Southampton on schedule but was aborted a few days later because Norway closed all its ports to cruise ships - I remember eventually getting a refund to my credit card for my pre-booking of Sindhu.

My own guess is that it might be that they currently can't guarantee in advance whether they'll have enough catering crew to actually operate the specialty restaurants. They seem to have struggled to tempt enough crew back post-Covid. (Incidentally it's not just the three ships that their email mentions where you can't pre-book. It also applies to Arcadia.)

Ah, looks like it was my mistake then. I'd thought that C101 was the mirror image of C102. Sorry about that.

Are you sure your cabin was C101, as you say "we" but I thought that was a single cabin. I was in C102, the corresponding cabin to C101 but on the opposite side of the ship, and that was certainly categorised as a single, even though it had either adjacent twin beds or a double (I can't remember which.)

The only snag with those forward cabins on C deck is that if a musical act or the Headliners are on in the theatre you get quite a bit of noise coming up into the cabin. Only really a problem if you're "early to bed" people, I suppose.

For my cruise on Arcadia on 8th August, an email I had from from P&O the other day encouraging me to pre-book things like wi-fi and (I think) spa treatments did mention that the specialty restaurants couldn't be pre-booked.

The first river cruise I ever did, about 10 years ago, it turned out that my cabin in the lowest deck was below the water line. I discovered when trying to asleep overnight that water is a very good conductor of sound, so I wished that I had brought ear plugs to keep out the noise from the screws and from locks filling and emptying.

I think all of the passenger outside cabins have proper windows.

If that was her Caribbean cruise, I was on that one too, and also had no trouble getting my case under the bed. It may be that some people have thicker cases than we do.

I've found that booking carefully chosen 24-hour slots can work out quite economically over the course of the cruise. Say I make a booking at 1pm one day, then I'll have wi-fi for the afternoon of that day (let's call it Day 1) and the morning of Day 2. Then I wait 24 hours and book another 24 hours at 1pm on Day 3. I'm only making bookings every second day, but every day of the cruise I'll have wifi for part of the day.

And I don't think Cruise Connections run any coaches from London but only from places further north.

From memory, yes and yes.

I wondered whether whatever regulatory authority oversees safety at sea might have told P&O that, now that Covid was more-or-less over, they wanted cruise lines to start doing "proper" muster drills again, rather than its being P&O's choice.

So you'll be on the road to Rouen.

I don't fancy carrying a bottle around with me, so it looks like I will be switching to drinking wine by the glass, even though it will no doubt work out a bit more expensive. One large glass with dinner is enough for me.

That's surprising, as on club dining on Aurora in Nov/Dec they were happy to do it, and you'd expect it to be the same on Arcadia and Aurora. Perhaps their willingness to do it varies from one waiter to another.

On "club dining", if you don't finish a bottle, then the waiter will write your table number on the label, take it the bottle and stopper it for you, and you will find it back on your table the following evening. I don't know if that's also possible on "freedom dining", as I don't know how the bottle would find you again.

There's also a phone number you can ring for restaurant reservations. You can also book them on the MyHoliday app thingy.

If it's out of copyright, then in most cases the author is going to be dead. And these e-books are well produced by reputable outfits and are much nicer to read than the free "raw text" versions that I know can be found on the web.

Did the crew member work in the kitchen? If not, they might have been relying on the rumour mill.

We know they had crew shortages post-Covid. If that included chefs, it might be the reason rather than to save money.

I'm very similar. And a Kindle is much smaller and lighter to pack for a cruise than two or three books. I've also discovered that there are a lot of Kindle e-books available of stories that are out of copyright that you can buy for only 99p, including many classics.