cruising.mark.uk

Does that road train still play the world's most annoying 'Alesund' tune / song on a continuous loop throughout the whole journey? We experienced that on a visit there probably 6 or 7 years ago now and I still haven't fully recovered from the trauma.

Dear Admin - can you start a separate new thread about the App and queuing, so that every existing thread doesn't deteriorate into discussions of those two (linked) subjects? This was a useful and informative thread in its own right, but has now dived down the App / queuing rabbit hole and I suspect will not return unless you force it! Thanks

If you can find me a hotel for £100ppnn with decent food and where the scenery changes every night while I sleep, I'm in. But if you can't, I think I'll probably stick to cruising. 😁

The menus in both changed at the end of the first week when we were on Arvia in April.

Plus, of course, the fact that Barcelona port run their own shuttles in addition to those provided by P&O. The port shuttles were definitely still running when we were there on Arvia in April. So, if it is busy, passengers can pick which one they queue for.

I'm finding it hard to work out what positive criticism would be, so guess I do see criticism as negative. But I didn't say that at least some of it wasn't justified and / or that it didn't reflect the experience of those who wrote it. My point was simply that it would be refreshing to see an upbeat review to counterbalance it - despite your confidence that contributors give very balanced feedback, there is very little positive to find amongst the catalogue of woes on the Arvia review thread. So, absolutely no rose-tinted glasses here, but a desire for both sides of the coin to be reflected accurately in a way that provides a more balanced perception of how the 15000+ customers per week on P&O find their holiday. Hearing that some people actually enjoy themselves on a P&O cruise and encounter no or few problems that impact significantly on their enjoyment might, hopefully, make some of those newer to P&O think twice before cancelling cruises on the basis of one person's bad experience.

You are better placed than anyone else posting on here to find out whether there were really any significant queues / delays on boarding. BTW, congrats on the football. We were at Trent Bridge yesterday for the cricket and left not long before the football match started. The Home fans were quite enthusiastic and fairly well-lubricated at that point, so I bet there was a real party afterwards! I've had a soft spot for Forest since Clough's day. So, well done them.

I suspect it was more a weather delay - a virtual storm in a social media teacup.

Which is why ICF will hopefully continue his live report. I sense that his glass half full approach will provide a dose of positivity which will offer a more upbeat and representative picture of how P&O are doing and counterbalance some of the recent negativity.

Its very strange how often cruise lines seem to forget to mention free port / city shuttles! PS I'm very impressed by your ability to seemingly produce a port / environs map for everywhere which comes up in conversation. Do you have your own library of those from your own research or is there one particular website you're obtaining them from?

I guess they were a bit wary of being set upon by unhappy punters if they told them how far it really was!

Agreed. But if the cruise lines are given no choice in the matter, then there's not much that can be done. We didn't try ourselves, but the staff at the drop-off point were giving people a map and instructions as to how to walk into the centre of town and saying that it would take about 15 minutes. And, no-one should have been in any doubt as to where the shuttle was going to drop them off, because it said explicitly in the Horizon the evening before that it was running to and from the science park.

Shuttles in Valencia from Arvia in Apr also went to the science park, rather than the centre of town. But, that may not be P&O's fault - there was at least one other ship in port and all of the shuttles went to and from the science park. Perhaps the port / town has imposed restrictions and now insists on that?

And the other bonus about having your boarding pass in advance if you do have to queue is that it means that you can book meals, entertainment etc as soon as you get in the terminal because the last ?6 or 8 (I can't remember!) digits under to barcode on your boarding pass are what you need to access the app to do that.

Our experience on Arvia in mid-April suggests that they do. We had priority boarding (1130) and arrived pretty much exactly on time. Boarding pass checked on arrival at terminal and went straight to check in from there. But, they were holding others in a queue outside. Once we had checked in, we were then sent to the 'priority boarding' waiting area, immediately adjacent to the doors into the security check area. But, at that time, there were already perhaps a hundred people sitting on the seats opposite the check-in desk. At a guess, they were passengers who had the first non-priority check in time (1200 perhaps?) who had turned up a little early and they were allowed in while there was space available while those with later times were held outside.

We did it on Arvia in April. A couple of days before the end of the cruise, you'll get a note about disembarkation and you can register for walk-off early disembarkation (i.e. carrying all your luggage). If I remember correctly, they offered a time window from about 0700 until main disembarkation started (0830?). We pitched up in the atrium area at about 0645 and there were probably a couple of hundred people milling about. We were off just after 0700 and in the car by 0710. We will certainly do it again because main disembarkation was, by all accounts, quite slow because of congestion in the baggage hall. We were worried that the lifts might be a bit chaotic (we were on deck 9 and disembarkation was deck 6), but they were pretty much deserted when we used them.

I agree. We were on Arvia in April. We queued for about 30 minutes for the shuttle at Valencia, but no more than 5 or 10 minutes anywhere else. If there are 6000 pax on Arvia and we assume, for the sake of argument that 1000 pax will not get off and 1000 will be on ship tours, that might mean 4000 using the shuttle. Return trip = 8000 journeys. With 20 shuttles at 50 pax each they can move 1000 at a time. So, if the passengers spaced their journey times out over an 8 hr port stop and each shuttle did one return journey per hour they would have more than enough capacity to move everyone. But, of course, passengers don't spread their journeys equally. So, at peak times there will be queues and longer waits.

Unless I misread your earlier posts, you got a shuttle, but you had to wait for it.

We were on MSC in Jan this year, northern Europe and Canaries. Some examples (per person): Hamburg 18E, Le Havre 11E, Rotterdam 13E, Arrecife 8E.

Did you check how much MSC were charging for their buses? On our January cruise with them, they were charging 10 or 15 E each way for shuttles in many ports. At those prices, they could afford to have many more buses than P&O. Or P&O could put up their charges to match, which would probably reduce demand and thus queues. So, I sense this might be a bit of a swings and roundabouts problem.

Surely those who are Elite should get a discount. Or is this another loyalty benefit that's being degraded?

Because, with a few notable recent exceptions, sites like this only report bad experiences and thus don't provide an accurate representation of a product that allows the vast majority of customers to have an enjoyable, snag-free holiday at a very reasonable price. There are similar horror stories on here relating to just about every cruise line, and across social media the same is true about just about every holiday operator and every holiday type. In a perfect world, no-one will have issues like those described by the OP, but the law of averages says that sometimes things will go awry. In those circumstances, how they are dealt with is what is important and P&O sometimes (as in this case) don't seem to deal with issues very well. That is what they need to address, but individual experiences need to be judged in the context of hundreds of thousands / millions of customers per year.

I very much doubt that it will come to that. We have just got home from 2 weeks on Arvia. In 14 nights, we did not dine once in a MDR or at the Quays or buffet. The only dinner we booked in advance was the Limelight Club. Except for Epicurean, it was possible to secure seats in the upcharge restaurants throughout the fortnight, so long as you were prepared to be pretty flexible on timings. For the no charge restaurants (6th St Diner and Olive Grove), it was not possible - before the cruise or on the ship - to book these restaurants for times later than 1830. If you wished to dine after that time, you joined the virtual queue. Between those two restaurants, we did that 7 times over the fortnight. We joined the queue around 1900 / 1915. The longest it took to secure a table was about 40 minutes. The shortest was 10 minutes. We also dined at Sindhu (twice), the Beach House (twice), Keel and Cow, Epicurean and the Limelight. I think people worry far too much about dining on Arvia, based on reported teething problems on the first couple of cruises. In our experience, the system works, the variety is fantastic and the quality and quantity of food (included and charged extra) was first rate throughout.

The Horizon for each stop still specifies the charges and says that it's free for those on Select. But, in practice, those administering the buses don't seem to have the capacity / will to scan cards, so many of those on Saver fares won't have been paying either.

They're meant to be charging those on Saver, but seem to have contracted out the process to local companies and the only place on this trip that we've had our card scanned to get on the bus was at Valencia. We left it until lunchtime to go out at Marseille and Barcelona and no one was scanning any cards on entry to shuttle buses at either location at the time we left or returned to the ship.