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49 minutes ago, Bazrat said:

Did you consider going to reception and telling them about the door not sealing properly.

We did, but reception seemed to be especially busy during our sailing with queues often stretching into the atrium. I think we just got used to it and did our best to ignore it. Again in retrospect, I wish I'd made more of an effort to raise the issue while onboard.

On 4/18/2022 at 12:11 PM, davecttr said:

As far as interaction between waiters in bars etc and customers my several years experience led me to wonder if they were trained in how to NOT make eye to eye contact with passengers. I must say there have been lots of wonderful staff though.

 

edit - the Glass House food has become more disappointing over the years and IMO was best in the original Ramblas on Ventura. Are they still trying to sell the revolting octopus? 🤢

Yes! I don't think a single bartender actually looked at me once, either looking around or at their tablet.

I don't recall octopus but I have to say during our cruise Glass House was one of the nicer dining experiences onboard!

On 4/17/2022 at 9:28 PM, miaandmum said:

We are onboard now and this is by far the worst  cruise we’ve ever been on. We’ve sailed with P&O snd royal caribbean before and none have been like this. Staff are miserable, don’t want to engage and like you, I stood at ripples this morning and the person serving walked away from me mid sentence!  Everyone on the cruise seems miserable, rude staff and passengers and no one looks happy. Frankly, can’t wait to get home. There’s something very off about this cruise and can’t put my finger on why. 

Sorry to hear you're having a similar experience to us! This is exactly the kind of atmosphere we felt onboard. Hope it improves for you!

On 4/18/2022 at 10:11 AM, Harryjacobs said:

May I ask, did you report the faulty balcony door to your steward?  We had a problem with our cabin and told the steward.  Within 30 mins maintenance arrived to correct the problem.

Our sailing was back in September and the staff were just outstanding.  If you want to see truly dreadful staff then have a weekend break at Butlins like we did earlier this year.

We only actually saw him once, where we didn't catch his name as he barely spent 2 minutes with us when we embarked. I think because we'd been told there were no other cabins prior to boarding we just decided to deal with it for the duration of the cruise. In retrospect, I probably would've raised it.

Aha I'll make a mental note to avoid Butlins in future then!

Hi All,

Thank you for your really helpful responses, it seems as if we just had a bad experience with this one, which was a shame but hopefully any future experiences will be better!

The consensus seems to be that booking with a travel agent isn't the way to go, this was our first time using a travel agent so will likely avoid that in the future!

It's been really interesting to read the comments on customer service as it seems most have had good experiences but a few have had similar to us, I wonder if it's just a current Iona issue...

I was just so surprised at the service we experienced as it was unlike any experience we'd ever had before on holiday let alone a cruise where we're used to such amazing service. While there were a few really bad examples like I outlined, it just seemed there was a general atmosphere of complete disinterest amongst the crew we encountered. For example, almost every waiter we had barely spoke to us from being seated to us leaving (when they weren't arguing with us) and this was the opposite of my previous experiences of servers who couldn't do enough for you.

We really aren't the kind of people to complain but I'm still considering sending something to P&O as it was so poor, I'm still shocked by some of the interactions.

I think I was worried that we'd just been lucky with our experiences on other lines and that this kind of service might be the norm!!

In terms of the 'app' it just felt so buggy to me and less functional than what we'd had before. I know we could phone other cabins, but as we spent so much time out of the cabins with family, it felt as if a messenger function would've been so useful for those times when we wanted to meet or if we were held up etc. But all in all, it wasn't a major issue in comparison to others.

I'm curious whether those with more P&O expertise would recommend smaller ships in the future? We've generally only sailed on larger ships, aside from the Disney Magic, and I wonder if the sheer number of passengers on Iona was a factor in our experience?

Hi All,

This is my first post on here, so I hope I've popped this in the right place. Apologies if I've missed something!

My family and I finished our Norweigian Cruise onboard Iona yesterday and we got off with a pretty poor impression of P&O, which is a huge shame as we have friends who rate it very highly and we were very excited prior to our cruise. I wanted to bring this up here in case we simply had some bad luck and P&O is usually a better experience than the one we had. The 3 major issues we had were:

1) Our difficulties started when we booked through a travel agent, we paid to select a standard balcony cabin and selected one Mid-Forward on deck 16, up until a few days before departure P&O's portal was still telling us our cabin had not been allocated. Repeated calls to their customer service team were met with the same response of "try again tomorrow".
We finally received our cabin allocation 2 days before departure only to find we'd been given a cabin on deck 5 forward, distinctly not what we had chosen, we specifically selected our cabin at booking. P&O simply told us to speak with our travel agent and when we finally got through they claimed P&O had given us a 'substantial upgrade' to this new cabin as we had left the 'consider me for upgrades' box ticked. A quick glance at the standard balcony cabins on deck 5 will tell you they are in no way an upgrade from the standard balconies higher up. This was particularly frustrating as our son can get slightly motion sick and we'd chosen to be closer to the middle for that reason. After speaking to P&O again they insisted there was nothing they could do and no other cabins available. We decided to make the most of it and hope for the best.
Once onboard we found our balcony door did not seal fully and every gust of wind could be heard all night, on top of the thumping from the limelight lounge directly above us. 

2) We found the customer service onboard Iona was utterly awful from beginning to end. We are all pretty relaxed and mild people in our family but the rudeness from some of the staff seriously pushed me to the limits of my patience, which is a pretty hard thing to do.
Whether it was the staff at our muster station barely stopping their conversation to acknowledge us, our cabin attendant looking like he'd rather be anywhere else than giving us the world's quickest explanation of how the in/out magnet for the door works, more waiters/bar staff than I can count barely raising more than a grunt during their entire interactions with us (this was more often the case than not), the keel and cow waiters who brought the meals for all but 2 members of our party and insisted point-blank the others hadn't ordered anything or finally the waiter at the gelato stand who walked off to talk to a colleague in the middle of us giving our order (literally mid-sentence).
The worst part was the daily battles to order any sort of drink with our non-alcoholic drinks package. Every single bartender or waiter had a completely different approach to taking our drinks orders and seemed to invent new rules/complications each time. Some only needed one of our cards to order, some needed all of them, some telling us they couldn't bring drinks to a particular seating space while their colleagues had done so just before.

The biggest difficulty came when trying to order alcoholic drinks, particularly with dinner. Every single time was like a battle to explain we understood we'd have to pay, on one occasion the waiter told us because of our package we couldn't have any alcohol at all and no matter how we tried to tell him we'd done it multiple times already he wouldn't budge. Only when his senior colleague came over did he finally accept it (he promptly grunted at us for the rest of the meal).

We've sailed on Royal Caribbean and Disney cruises before and have always left so amazed at the customer service of the staff and how welcoming and attentive they are. Iona's crew felt the exact opposite, where the goal was to make you feel as unwelcome as possible and to be as irritated as possible at having to do anything for you. It felt like even the crew that were 'good' were only good in comparison to their peers. This pretty much ruined a lot of our time on Iona for us which is a huge shame as we're usually pretty difficult to upset and yet every single day was filled with these bad experiences. Quick shout out to the Oasis Spa team for being the exception to this!

3) Last one I promise! The 'My Holiday' browser/app thing. Aside from being barely usable, it often failed to let us book things, wouldn't load, left out bookings from our diaries and was just a general pest, both prior to boarding and onboard. 

One thing, in particular, was the lack of any messaging function, which meant that trying to meet up with family members we were travelling with was such a pain and our Son was restricted in how easily he could go off with friends he'd made onboard.

It feels like P&O need to do something with this, both Royal Caribbean and Disney have much better apps, and apparently so does Princess, so I don't understand why P&O's was this bad.  

I'm sorry for this huge rant, I hope it doesn't upset anyone, but it really shocked me how bad this cruise felt compared to others we'd experienced and how our friends talk about their experiences with P&O. I could have gotten over the cabin and the annoyance of the technology but the customer service was probably the worst I've ever experienced in any capacity, let alone whilst on a cruise.

So coming to the end of this monster post I just want to ask, should we avoid P&O in the future or was this just a bad experience? I'd love to hear if anyone has had a better experience!