themanwithahat

I'm thinking of taking the kids on their first cruise in summer 2015. My twins will have just turned 6yrs and my youngest will be 3.5yrs. Am I mad? :D

 

We were thinking of a 3 night on Ventura to see how they get on. Does anyone have any tips on cruising with young kids? I'm worried about them getting bored. What are the kids clubs like?

There were some very young children on Ventura. Mine are now teenagers, and we didn't cruise when they were small, but the 'downsides' are the same as taking young children on any holiday really - you tend to turn in earlier because they may not at 4 (or 6 for that matter) be able to stay up late. Some of the younger ones seemed to have bought a grandparent or two along which is quite a good idea because you can rotate babysitting duties.

I have no idea what the kids clubs are like, but we were told there were 200 children on board, and we hardly saw them except for meals or shows, no bored children wandering about :)

It depends. We are not really night owls, and we found on 2nd sitting that if you wanted to see a show you were going to have a late night.

This time around we did first sitting and it worked much better. The downside is that you have to be back earlyish if you are off the boat and want to eat on it.

We like the regularity of the organised dinner, though we may try freedom dining sometime.

A regular we met said, though this may not be true of course, that after three or four days you could use freedom dining if you were booked on fixed dining. Didn't try it.

On another social media site, some of the first returnees are reporting that luggage was transferred direct from airport to ship and vice versa.

We're one of those.

At Brum the luggage was checked in as normal. On arrival at Genoa we were taken through passport very fast straight out to buses - apparently no real customs checks or anything to a bus to the ship, about 20 minutes or so, and checked in a bit like at Soton. The luggage appeared in the room as it normally does. We hadn't seen it since check in. It did I think take a bit longer (we got an unexpected upgrade so asked because our labels had the old cabin on) and they said "in the next 3-4 hours", probably because most of the flights arrived at much the same time.

Returning from Venice. About half way through we filled in a form stating how much hold luggage we had, and which flight we were on. The day before leaving, we got an envelope containing a luggage tag and a security tag for our hold luggage, which were colour coded, which you applied yourself. Hold luggage was put out the night before disembarkation and collected by staff. We didn't see it again until the carousel at Birmingham. Along with the envelope there was a sheet explaining the process and giving staggered disembarkation times - there was an information screen in the atrium and regular announcements over the tannoy when various flights needed to disembark.

So it's actually not that different to Soton, except with a flight in the middle :)

You do need to have enough space to keep a morning change in the hand luggage on the way back.

Please let us know how your fly cruise in the mediteranian went. And any tips that you can think of.

In genoa was there a shop near by to buy cans of pop.water or wine.

Did you have to Collect luggage at airport or was it transferred to ship.

How much were the shuttle buses.

In venice were was the nearest vaporretto stop to the ship.

Did p&o provide fact sheet with a small map of port area and things to do.

Did the drink prices seam to be a lot dearer

 

And anything ales that will help plan our cruises. Thanks

Hi. Just back from N407 (Genoa to Venice) about 3 days ago.

1) Possibly but options to use it are limited. The boat to/from airport transition is organised so you don't have any time to explore Genoa. I didn't actually see anywhere.

2) The nearest water taxi looked to be maybe about 10-15 minutes walk away (guess as we sailed past it). There were public transport options at the dock but they looked shut. Rate was the same as P&O (8 one way,15 return). The transfer is about 30 minutes. There was no ticketing system so people just queued outside the atrium. Realistically if you want to spend significant time in Venice you are better off booking a hotel for the day before/after. We didn't do this.

3) Yes, but the maps on the fact sheets are not very good. They did give us a colour map on the way out which was much better. P&O drop you in a place which is easy to find. Venice is all little windy streets but actually not difficult to find your way about.

4) On the boat, pretty much pub level. Not cheap, not a complete rip off either. If you mean Venice, it depends where you are. Yes, it's expensive, but it varies from insane (St Marks) to pricey but affordable.

WRT to the Fly-Cruise part, we found that the bits run by P&O worked pretty well but the bits run by the Italians were useless ; Venice airport obviously (IMO) couldn't cope with the volume required. We were an hour late taking off and Thomson were not very happy with them :) The other main downside was most of the flights were timed to arrive in Italy about 10-11 Italian time. This meant a flight time of about 8-9ish, which meant (in our case) getting up around 4.30 am for a flight from BHX, so for the first day you were pretty tired. I'm not sure I'd do it again, the main advantage is if you can only get a week off. Not actually sure you save a lot over the sail round.