broadbent

I understand that there are two separate companies who clearly have cut the market to suit them. Is this legal?

Last cruise from Southampton was P&O. I left the car at terminal and on return had a simple walk across the road to the car park.

But here is my question. Why is the car parking with Cunard a lot more expensive than if you go on Celebrity?

Seriously - you don't believe that do you?

look at

http://marinesurveypractice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/ship-stability-inclining-test-procedure.html

and you will see that this test is not something you just enter into.

P&O must have known this sometime before. They chose to do it in Venice because they were ideal conditions. For all I know, the 18 day cruise, as opposed to the 17 day cruise was designed specifically to do this.

But hey, I am no marine expert.

There was one thing that particularly annoyed me.

We booked the cruise which had an overnight stop in Venice and we had planned to go out to eat in our favourite Venetian restaurant. A week later, we might have gone to the opera in Verona.

A few days before Venice, we were told that the ship needed to do some test and that we would need to be back on board by 12pm. P&O must have known months ago they were going to do this but could not be bothered to tell us.

If we had booked tickets etc for the Opera (it starts this week) would P&O have refunded our costs? I spoke to P&O customer services on our return, and all they could give us was a lame apology.

The truth is that we will never cruise with P&O again. We paid for deluxe cabins which was not nearly as nice as Celebrity and cost about the same. Bad value for money.

Restaurant staff are great - food not so great.

Cabin staff are great.

Crows Nest really nice and lots of nice mood music.

The quizzes are introduced by illiterates - ie World War II was thought to be World War Eleven.

Cinema nice to have.

P&O are mean about many small things.

Ugo somebody, the tenor from Naples was awful. Hope you don't have him.

Cruise Critic asked me to send in my review which I did at some effort in time, and it is nowhere to be found. Could it be because it wasn't the most glowing of endorsements?

Sorry to hear of your problem, but your message says that you are based in UK, so I assume UK contract law applies.

Mr. John Bull put it right.

So insist that the Contract all parties entered into being honoured.

Good luck

Anyone know about shuttle buses in Dubrovnik?

We went there with Celebrity. You need a shuttle bus to get to town, and you need some local currency to buy food etc.

Not that much to see, but the wharf is very interesting with its built in organ driven by wave power.

We had a problem at Mykonos finding a taxi back to port.

We did find a private car willing to charge us.