ThePauls

I'd like us to try one of the Asia cruises next year if budgets permit, otherwise maybe we'll finally get around to doing a Baltic itinerary - it's been on the list for a long time!

The trains are warm inside even if the mountain air isn't - I've experienced it pretty warm (20C in April!) and less so on the second visit (about 14C in September). There's the option to simply stay on the train though if it might be too cold, the train goes up and down the valley from Flam port to Myrddal in a straight line, so perhaps if the weather isn't so great he could stay on the train all the way up and back down? The views are spectacular even from inside!

We didn't book with the ship's tour the second time as it was so much more expensive than buying a ticket from Flam train station. Check whether any other ships are due in with yours - http://crew-center.com/flam-norway-cruise-ship-schedule-2018, I'd read advise on these very forums that the train can sell out if more than one ship is in - so then pre-booking would be more important. When we visited on CMV Magellan it was the only ship and there were tons of spaces available (the first train was only half full!). If you're on a very large ship I guess even the one ship could cause a problem though...

Good to hear they're both on board, great live music last time we were on the Spirit from both groups. Back on-board again on the 3rd April :-)

We were on the Spirit last May for a repositioning (9 night) and it was a great cruise on a great ship. Good entertainment all day long. Back on the ship again for two weeks from just after Easter, can't wait :-) Happy to see from the other thread that Strum Jam and New Dimension are still on board, we enjoyed the live music so much on that last cruise.

We've done several East Med cruises with Thomson/Marella and would highly recommend the company for cruises operating in the area. Flights and transfers have worked well and the itineraries (e.g. Ancient Wonders, Adriatic Explorer) are varied. We'll likely be organising a big family cruise later in the year to this side of the world in September and it will almost certainly be a Marella trip.

I would say that Marella has the edge where friendliness of service and (in the past) cost is concerned. I really have to emphasize this, on Marella ships I have found drinks service and MDR waiters to be a lot more personable, P&O staff are professional and polite for sure, but I've had a lot more chats with Marella staff. P&O ships usually offer slightly more varied entertainment (not just musical-style shows but other evening shows as well). Marella don't seem to ever have guest speakers anymore which is a shame. Food is great on both in general, we've had the odd bad meal on ships with both lines but never enough to spoil a holiday.

Personally I much prefer not having the "hidden" tip tax - when comparing cruise costs I always have to remind myself that other companies charge a specific amount per night, whereas Marella has this included in the price. Other than these general points I would also consider the specific ship for each cruise as others have stated above. We've had a number of bad experiences with tender ports not going well (on Marella and Fred Olsen), so would avoid any itinerary with more than one tender port if at all possible (these seem to be very susceptible to delays disembarking or outright cancellation).

Oh how exciting, about to book on the 9th April departure on Ventura, very happy to hear the work will already be done. Saw a LED wall on a Costa ship last year and it was very effective indeed.

Oh, Asia itineraries will be very tempting, always wanted to tour SE Asia on a ship and now we will be able to with our favourite cruise line.

As for the name change, well that's a bit weird if I'm honest. I'd rather say we cruise with Tui than "Marella", which according to Google is already a women's clothes company in the UK (which also sells through John Lewis): https://gb.marella.com/. Someone at marketing didn't do their homework!

Will happily post upon our return :-)

This topic, of cruises getting more expensive, is something that I had on my mind the last year. We've mostly sailed with Thomson, though have also cruised with P&O, CMV and Costa (now there's a line to avoid in school holidays! ;-) ), and I've been thinking This topic, of cruises getting more expensive, is something that I had on my mind the last year. We've mostly sailed with Thomson, though have also cruised with P&O, CMV and Costa (now there's a line to avoid in school holidays! ;-) ), and I've been thinkibg the very same but about thomson: the cost of their cruises is going up and up and looking poorer value compared to other lines.

We have always preferred Thomson to P&O etc as we like smaller, friendlier ships. The move towards bigger ships (e.g. Discovery as mentioned above) worries me as well. We're sailing on Braemar next week for the first time so it'll be an interesting comparison. In the past FO cruises seemed expensive to me compared to Thomson but that situation seems to be reversing (note we aren't booking balconies or suites)...the very same but about thomson: the cost of their cruises is going up and up and looking poorer value compared to other lines.

We have always preferred Thomson to P&O etc as we like smaller, friendlier ships. The move towards bigger ships (e.g. Discovery as mentioned above) worries me as well. We're sailing on Braemar next week for the first time so it'll. e an interesting comparison. In the past FO cruises seemed expensive to me compared to Thomson but that situation seems to be reversing (note we aren't booking balconies or suites)...

Hello ThePauls and thank you for your kind words. I do hope that you enjoy your Diadema cruise. Look forward to hearing your thoughts. Happy Cruising. :)

Back now, overall it was a great holiday - much better than our first and only previous cruise with Costa in 2010. The Diadema is a lovely ship, the crew are friendly and the itinerary is a good one for sure. So, on to our take on this cruise:

Embarkation: We flew to Barcelona for this circular cruise. It's an easy airport transfer; I booked a private taxi in advance for both ways via a website. The terminal building is quite small, we arrived latish so there was no queue for security or registration but we witnessed much longer queues while waiting for our transfer back to the airport on the last day.

The ship: Diadema is the largest ship we've been on. It's a well organised ship though, the bars and entertainment venues are good, the theatre is massive and has good seating. Getting on and off never seemed a problem despite the large pax capacity. We had a balcony on deck 8 and loved it for the private open air space it gave us - the Lido up on deck 10/11 was a bit echoy and noisy for us to sit there for long although the sofa-style seating on deck 11 is very nice.

Entertainment: The entertainment was very, very good: which must be a challenge given the number of languages on board. There's a noticeable difference in the music that is played compared to a British ship - lots more Spanish and Italian songs in particular. The evening entertainment was more varied than on say a P&O or Thomson ship: an opera singer, two very different acrobatic/juggling/circus style acts, a couple of themed musical shows, etc. The latin dance group in the Orlov bar venue were all excellent dancers. The lounge bar musicians were off a generally high standard as far as we could tell but we didn't spend much time in the piano bar or other smaller venues as the speaker volume in entertainment areas of the ship were higher than we found comfortable (theatre wasn't so bad luckily!).

Food: Breakfasts in the buffet, as I had read in advance on these boards, is cold buffet only. It's a proper scrum too as you'd expect from 4000 odd passengers - they do have more than enough seating though, which is better than on the larger P&O ships. The sit-down breakfast in the Fiorentina restaurant offers a menu of cooked breakfasts and the option of the buffet as well - a great compromise if you're not all wanting the same style of food. The service breakfast was rather chaotic, we never ate here in the evening to see if this was a general issue. Evening meals in the Adularia restaurant were very good. Food was of a high standard, although all menus were Italian inspired so not as much variety as we are used to. I enjoyed every meal I had, my vegetarian husband had some rather repetitive food (e.g. spinach-based starter and then a lot of spinach in the main as well) but the standard was generally high.

Drinks: Not much to say here, the prices are high for a Brit post-sterling slump. They whack a service charge on every drink - we're not used to this, but the base holiday price is so cheap it's kind of expected they'd make up the money somewhere else. Good variety of drinks, the German themed pub was a nice addition to the ship although it rarely seemed busy. The lack of any cider was an annoyance to my husband, have Magners, Koppaberg or Rekordelig not made it to the Med yet?

Ports: This is what makes a holiday for me and this cruise had a great itinerary. We did all DIY, the Costa Travel excursions are expensive (Sterling again!) and the ports were all easy to deal with. Palma we just walked around as we've not seem much of it before. At Civitavecchia we took a train to Rome and did our own walking tour of major sights (we've been before). At La Spezia we took the train to Pisa and had great fun seeing the tower and surrounding civic/religious buildings. At Savona we did a little shopping walk around but, by chance, decided to go up the bell tower and it was an absolute delight. Lots of steps and no lift, but they're doing free guided tours for small groups and the place is crammed to the rafters with paintings and historical objects. It also offers nice views from the roof! At Marseilles we took the paid bus in and walked around, then we took the trolley train up to see the Basilica de Notre Dame: stunning views of the city and an impressive church to visit.

Thanks for all this detail, we're off on the Diadema today for the same itinerary. It was good to have such a balanced review. We have sailed with Costa once before but that happened to be the week of the Icelandic volcano eruption so other matters overshadowed memories of the cruise itself rather... ;)

We did a Fjords itinerary on the Magellan last September. The ship and crew were lovely - well up to Thomson standards of friendliness and welcome. Main dining was faultless, we were nervous about the set dining after so many freedom-dining cruises but we were lucky and had a great set of dining companions for the 6 days.

I would say the entertainment staff, specifically the show team, were not quite up to what we have been used to on Thomson, although I've read elsewhere that standards there may be slipping across the board. It was a nice change to have live musicians playing with the shows though. There was a lecturer onboard that gave three very informative talks on the Vikings.

The only real criticism I can make is that the buffet dining hours are very restricted compared to other ships, e.g. the evening buffet ends at 9pm! So no midnight snacks to be had anywhere.

All in all though we were impressed and CMV offer a lot of no-fly options for anyone, like us, who are fed up with the airport 'experience'.

After many happy cruises with Thomson we've booked P&O for our next cruise. Thomson cruises seem to be getting more and more expensive and the shift of newer itineraries to the Middle East isn't for us. At this time of year the only options Thomson have are the Canaries that we've done several times or over-priced (IMHO) Caribbean trips.

We'll consider them again next year as the crews on their ships have always been so friendly and welcoming but the overall package isn't quite as attractive nowadays.

Intereting news about the new ships. It is a shame they're not expanding the fleet as more variety of cruise areas would be nice. I too echo WeeCountryMan's comment earlier about UK based ships. I really wish Thomson would offer no-fly options.

We've been on a good number of Thomson cruises now and the airport/flight 'experience' at the start and end of the holiday is always such a let down compared to the actual on-board experience. It doesn't help so many itineries are now based out of Marmaris, that bus transfer from Dalaman is a killer!

Our next holiday will have to be with a different cruise line I fear...

We had family with us with limited mobility back in May when we did Ancient Wonders so for Bozcaada we walked around the town, market and castle. As mentioned the castle is cheap to enter and worth an hour at least just wandering around. The family really loved it!

We'd done Ephesus on a previous version of this cruise so we did the half-day Miletus & Didyma. This tour includes quieter ruins to visit, slightly off the beaten tourist path, a very nice little tour.

Enjoy the cruise!

Thanks for the comments. We'll stick to the Med for a bit I think just for the shorter travel times and fewer sea days. The Eastern Caribbean sounds like it might be a better bet to avoid excessive sea days but then I wanted to see some of the Central American sights so it was worth doing this trip the once!

We did a two weeks cruise on the Dream, Cuban Fusion + Pride of Panama back in January (starting 30th Dec 2014). I wrote this ready to post after coming back but for a few reasons only just got access to post it now.

M'Bay Airport

We arrived slightly late (due to late departure from UK) but were whisked through very quickly to coaches. I was throughly impressed at the time as the luggage was taken straight to the ship (and the same coming back) which was a nice touch. It seems like Thomson had learned the painful lessons from the week before as it was handled much better on the 30th Dec. But it is very true that the staff at the airport are rude, and for the return journey there are far too many repeat checks of documentation. For that return flight (also delayed in leaving seemingly by the inefficient ground staff) they even had to do two a headcount on the plane in case someone had boarded the wrong flight!

Impressions of the Dream

It was our first holiday on the Thomson Dream, we've already done the other three active ships at least once. I'll state upfront that all of this is very much our personal opinions:

The coffee bar is a big plus, I've heard there's one on the Celebration too but we haven't been back on it to see this yet. However they do not serve any herbal tea (even peppermint) in there, very strange omission!

We loved the food in the MDR (Orion's) and had very good food and drinks waiters.

The buffet was generally good although my partner is veggie and sometimes the veggie options were pretty unimaginative.

The musicians were all a good standard and we enjoyed listening to them. The trio (Tunesmith) play Mariachi style, moving around the room to do request songs, it works great in the smaller bars but not so well in the large Medusa lounge. We also thought on a related note that this venue is too big for the early evening quizzes, we much prefer the ambience on the Celebration/Spirit for these.

We found, personally, the show team were not as friendly as other teams we've encountered, especially the cruise director who was more actively involved in the shows and seemed to be less involved in mixing with the passengers. The evening shows were very good though some were repeated on our second week sadly.

The itineraries and sea days

I agree with some of the comments on other Dream threads that the distances are too large and the sea days are too many. Backup ports are not available or are possibly congested with other ships.

Cuban Fusion port comments:

Playa del Carmen - ship tender operation cancelled mid morning (as described in previous posts) and ship moved to Cozumel cutting short the time in port

Havana - a great port to visit but one word of warning on the Havana Highlights tour. We compared notes on this over dinner with some other passengers and felt rather short changed since our group spent 40 minutes (!) shopping at the Cigar Museum, the tour guide did nothing to hurry things up and we missed out on seeing a lot as our walking tour was much shorter than other groups! If you do this and the cigar shopping takes longer than 15 mins it'd be worth speaking up!

Pride of Panama comments:

Cartagena - like many ports in this week there's no option to walk from the ship to something interesting, nor a shuttle bus. We did a tour (the 1/2 day Mangrove Swamp) so we didn't want to add on the expense of taxis to see the old town in the afternoon.

San Blas - cancelled due to the high winds we experienced for much of the week - the weather was generally sunny and hot but very windy. San Blas was a beach stop with no tours but an extra sea day when there are already two programmed was unwelcome.

Colón, Panama - we did the canal tour by boat, it was excellent although the boat we were on hadn't enough seating in the shade and since we happened to arrive on the last bus spent most of the time stood in the shade as the only seats left were in the blazing sun for 8 hours! Lots of complaints that this tour sold out so quickly, if you didn't book in advance or book at the end of the previous week (we did this; there was a port talk for two-week itinerary passengers before the changeover day) you were out of luck. That's pretty bad if you imagine booking the cruise and finding out on day 1 that the number one trip is already full!

Puerto Limon, Costa Rica - a dock-port that was cancelled due to the high winds, we stayed overnight in Colón instead. This was very disappointing as we were so looking forward to the Sloth Sanctuary+Rainforest trip. In the end we were glad to have the extra day in port as the three days at sea were so rough this week.

I think Thomson really needs to completely rethink these itineraries. Why is the ship based out of Jamaica for itineraries that are, for the most part, showcasing the Central American Caribbean coast? The worst of the sea days were those crossing the open sea between islands (Cuba or Jamaica) and the coast. Wouldn't it be better to fly to a Central American port like Cartagena and to then just make the run to Cuba for that week? If they could possibly rejig the holidays to not have two full sea days per week that would be a big improvement as well.

We liked the ports we made it to, and have some great memories but I'd hesistate to travel so far with Thomson again as their cruise formula seems to work much better in the Med or Canary Islands where backup ports are available and the one sea day per week makes things seem better value.

Hello all. Finally got my login working, though I've been reading the forums for months now.

We've been on all four current Thomson ships (and the old car ferry the Calypso years ago). Also have cruised with P&O twice (Oceana and Azura) and with Costa once. So far I've always found the staff and passengers on Thomson ships friendlier. I will say that the prices on Thomson cruises are edging too high for us, we did the two weeks on the Dream (Cuban Fusion + Pride of Panama starting on the 30th Dec 2014). The staff were awesome as always though the windy weather and cancelled ports were a real shame.

Will hopefully be booking onto a Greek cruise early May on the Majesty or Spirit. That's going to be the acid test as it were - as to whether we keep cruising with Thomson or consider other options in future. For the record my last experience of P&O was 2012 on the Azura (Norwegian Fjords), there were two days at sea in a one week holiday and the ship stopped in Stavanger on a public holiday (most stuff was shut). The tipping culture on most cruises grate on us a bit, I prefer Thomson for that. Ships like the Azura are too large for our personal tastes as well.