First P&O Sailing - Is it usually like this?

[Fionboard]

15 hours ago, Harry Peterson said:

The only information I have is that on each occasion that we've had to raise issues about a cruise (leaving aside straightforward booking issues) we've always ended up dealing directly with P&O.  Agents usually act as little more than post boxes anyway, so it was just cutting out the middle man. so to speak.  Some of the discussions with P&O have involved legal issues, usually around the terms of the contract, and settlements have always been direct with them.  The agents have never been involved in the discussions.

 

On the contract point, by the way P&O weren't really being very helpful - or accurate - when they told you what they did.  There are indeed two contracts involved (three if you count the one between agent and P&O) but not as they described.  One contract is between you and P&O, and the other is between you and the agent.  So far as the cruise itself is concerned though, the contract is between you and P&O - the agent is simply acting on behalf of the principal, P&O in taking your money and making the arrangements.  The main contract is between you and P&O and their suggestion that they couldn't discuss issues with you is just plain wrong.  And a cop-out!

 

I suppose it suits them to take that line, though, because it's probably easier to convince an agent that there was no problem than the passenger who was directly impacted.  I've certainly succeeded in getting full refunds for cruises which P&O made major changes to before departure, when the agent would have given up.

Perfectly explained!

[gsmt47471015]

It is and that's  something we accept for the peace of mind, savings rates are irrelevant at his moment.

[zap99]

2 minutes ago, gsmt47471015 said:

It is and that's  something we accept for the peace of mind, savings rates are irrelevant at his moment.

I don't accept that paying money to a middleman weeks early is acceptable, so book direct.

[Britboys]

57 minutes ago, zap99 said:

I don't accept that paying money to a middleman weeks early is acceptable, so book direct.

But a decent TA only requests payment a few days ahead of the P&O deadline, not weeks.

[Harry Peterson]

49 minutes ago, zap99 said:

I don't accept that paying money to a middleman weeks early is acceptable, so book direct.

 

I can see exactly where you're coming from, but not all agents operate that way, some will give a pretty decent discount off the total price paid, and some will also enable you to book specific cabins when bookings first open (which for some peculiar reason P&O won't allow you to do).

 

Prior to taking cruises with P&O we tended to book direct too, but P&O were so awful to deal with we gave up on them after the first cruise and switched to an agent.  It's a good one, though, and the one most people on these forums seem to use.  It was recommended to us by a couple of seasoned cruisers.  I've always booked over the phone with them (no branches beyond their Head Office) but we did call in at their Head Office on one occasion and received excellent treatment, including coffees and a comfortable seat while we waited.

[wowzz]

1 hour ago, Fionboard said:

Have you noticed that TA balance payment date is always earlier than P&O's. Holding money?!!

The TA many of us use do not hold money. Payment is taken on behalf of P&O, and full payment is only required 7 days earlier than the P&O final payment date, so hardly excessive.

You seem to be very anti TAs. I agree that there some bad ones out there,  but you should not tar them all with the same brush. 

[Fionboard]

Just anti (and disappointed with) the one I have used numerous times.  However, have never tested them with post booking queries until this time and now realise their failings (and seen the reviews on line!).  You do not know how good a TA is until you have problems (as with insurance companies) !!  

[zap99]

1 hour ago, Harry Peterson said:

 

I can see exactly where you're coming from, but not all agents operate that way, some will give a pretty decent discount off the total price paid, and some will also enable you to book specific cabins when bookings first open (which for some peculiar reason P&O won't allow you to do).

 

Prior to taking cruises with P&O we tended to book direct too, but P&O were so awful to deal with we gave up on them after the first cruise and switched to an agent.  It's a good one, though, and the one most people on these forums seem to use.  It was recommended to us by a couple of seasoned cruisers.  I've always booked over the phone with them (no branches beyond their Head Office) but we did call in at their Head Office on one occasion and received excellent treatment, including coffees and a comfortable seat while we waited.

We booked a couple of times with a well known travel agent ( think Poirot on the Nile ). First time 10 weeks and over a couple of years 13 weeks. They went bust, fortunately without our cash. Last time we booked with an agent was flights to Canada, hotel, tour, cruise. It was a bit like being piggy in the middle. I am sure folk have their favourite agent who give them excellent service and a discount. Good luck to them. We will book with one at some point, but not until there is a definite and quantifiable benefit.

[Harry Peterson]

8 minutes ago, zap99 said:

We booked a couple of times with a well known travel agent ( think Poirot on the Nile ). First time 10 weeks and over a couple of years 13 weeks. They went bust, fortunately without our cash. Last time we booked with an agent was flights to Canada, hotel, tour, cruise. It was a bit like being piggy in the middle. I am sure folk have their favourite agent who give them excellent service and a discount. Good luck to them. We will book with one at some point, but not until there is a definite and quantifiable benefit.

I respect your judgment, Zap, and understand your reasoning.  For me, though, 5% off the total cruise cost is a sufficiently definite and quantifiable benefit - I do have Yorkshire origins, though!  😉

[Selbourne]

17 minutes ago, Harry Peterson said:

I respect your judgment, Zap, and understand your reasoning.  For me, though, 5% off the total cruise cost is a sufficiently definite and quantifiable benefit - I do have Yorkshire origins, though!  😉

As our contact at P&O is not there any more we now use the same TA as you. I’m pretty certain that the discount we had wasn’t as much as 5% (on top of the 5% that you get from P&O anyway as a previous customer). Did you have to haggle for that or does it improve after a few bookings?

[zap99]

48 minutes ago, Harry Peterson said:

I respect your judgment, Zap, and understand your reasoning.  For me, though, 5% off the total cruise cost is a sufficiently definite and quantifiable benefit - I do have Yorkshire origins, though!  😉

5% is tempting, even to us ex London lads 🤣

[Cruisemeister2002]

On 4/17/2022 at 6:57 PM, skip121 said:

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!

Sounds to me like you were very unlucky. We have been on 15 previous P&O cruises and whilst I cannot say they were all perfect I would honestly say 13 out of the 15 were spot on. I don't wish to make excuses for staff as there really isn't any excuse for abruptness or bad manners. I do feel some of the problems you had as with your cabin steward may have been due to the pandemic. I do however believe that whether we have this pandemic hanging over our heads or not P&O should make your cruise as enjoyable as they are able to. If for whatever reason I have been dissatisfied with what has been afforded to me I haven't hesitated in writing to head office in Southampton and in general have been satisfied with the compensation or hamper they have sent me. Can't unfortunately guarantee that your gripes would receive anything as mine have usually been for something I paid for that wasn't up to scratch. I am a person who has regularly commented on things we used to get on a P&O cruise against what we get now and although I am aware they are one of the cheapest on the market this doesn't in my opinion mean that little extra's should be dispensed with. I appreciate that turndowns at night have been removed due to the pandemic. But charging £2.50 for a breakfast in your cabin seems to go against the idea that turndowns have been dispensed with due to contact with staff. Hot chocolate used to be available for free, toiletries in your cabin were in a little P&O bag and steaks could be asked for when not on the menu and were of considerable better quality than those dished up now. I can't say how things really are at the moment as due to Covid and changes in itinerary we last sailed in 2018

[Harry Peterson]

35 minutes ago, Selbourne said:

As our contact at P&O is not there any more we now use the same TA as you. I’m pretty certain that the discount we had wasn’t as much as 5% (on top of the 5% that you get from P&O anyway as a previous customer). Did you have to haggle for that or does it improve after a few bookings?

It's over and above all P&O discounts, but I imagine the % might depend on circumstances.  No haggling, as such, but it's not automatic and may vary according to the number of cruises booked with them, the type of booking and their margin on it. It might be relevant that we've been booking suites, but they've always been 'first day' priced ones.  It's the way they handle those (specific suite only, rather than just a Grade) that attracted us originally.

[Selbourne]

2 minutes ago, Harry Peterson said:

It's over and above all P&O discounts, but I imagine the % might depend on circumstances.  No haggling, as such, but it's not automatic and may vary according to the number of cruises booked with them, the type of booking and their margin on it. It might be relevant that we've been booking suites, but they've always been 'first day' priced ones.  It's the way they handle those (specific suite only, rather than just a Grade) that attracted us originally.

Thanks. We’ve made four bookings with them, all on release day (early release in fact as we are Caribbean tier) and the ‘Cruise Cash Back’ (discount) only equated to around 2%, so nowhere near the 5% you are getting. 5% discount used to be pretty much the norm for all TA’s (although our first cruise was 12.5%) but my understanding was that P&O had cut commission levels and TA discounts had dropped accordingly. Like you, we went with the TA for the service aspect, with the discount being secondary, but I will need to try harder if 5% is still achievable!

[Harry Peterson]

1 hour ago, Selbourne said:

Thanks. We’ve made four bookings with them, all on release day (early release in fact as we are Caribbean tier) and the ‘Cruise Cash Back’ (discount) only equated to around 2%, so nowhere near the 5% you are getting. 5% discount used to be pretty much the norm for all TA’s (although our first cruise was 12.5%) but my understanding was that P&O had cut commission levels and TA discounts had dropped accordingly. Like you, we went with the TA for the service aspect, with the discount being secondary, but I will need to try harder if 5% is still achievable!

 

Not to mislead you in any way, I should say that the last bookings we made were in 2018 (mostly for 2020 cruises), and there were quite a few of them.  Then of course Covid hit, and everything changed.  I have no idea what's achievable now, but if margins are lower that 5% may be more elusive.

[terrierjohn]

3 hours ago, zap99 said:

We booked a couple of times with a well known travel agent ( think Poirot on the Nile ). First time 10 weeks and over a couple of years 13 weeks. They went bust, fortunately without our cash. Last time we booked with an agent was flights to Canada, hotel, tour, cruise. It was a bit like being piggy in the middle. I am sure folk have their favourite agent who give them excellent service and a discount. Good luck to them. We will book with one at some point, but not until there is a definite and quantifiable benefit.

We certainly feel our TA gives us a very quantifiable benefit, as well as a discount on the P&O price and the specific cabin we want on launch, our agent has worked wonders with P&O in resolving problems and a couple of very thorny cancellations that P&O refused us initially. 

So we intend to continue with them, probably for the remainder of our cruising life.

[gsmt47471015]

6 hours ago, zap99 said:

I don't accept that paying money to a middleman weeks early is acceptable, so book direct.

We've booked on board a number of times and then had the details sent to our TA, always at P and O 's request and have then subsequently had a further discount/OBC, or similar added , if the middleman can do that for us then we have no problem with them having the balance three weeks or so early👍 

[zap99]

19 minutes ago, terrierjohn said:

We certainly feel our TA gives us a very quantifiable benefit, as well as a discount on the P&O price and the specific cabin we want on launch, our agent has worked wonders with P&O in resolving problems and a couple of very thorny cancellations that P&O refused us initially. 

So we intend to continue with them, probably for the remainder of our cruising life.

If you are happy with them, why not. One day we will use a TA.

Edited April 21, 2022 by zap99

[terrierjohn]

15 minutes ago, zap99 said:

If you are happy with them, why not. One day we will use a TA.

I would have thought that after P&Os recent woeful customer service, that many people would want the comfort of a good TA.

[molecrochip]

6 hours ago, Fionboard said:

Have you noticed that TA balance payment date is always earlier than P&O's. Holding money?!!

It was originally set in days when an agent had to send cheques to head office for cashing so that money was available so a cheque could be issued to P&O by the due date.

 

These days a long gone but agents have never changed their timescales instead preferring to hold money.

[wowzz]

4 hours ago, molecrochip said:

These days a long gone but agents have never changed their timescales instead preferring to hold money.

To be fair, you should say "some" agents hold money.  We all know that P&O's biggest TA does not hold money at all.

[jeanlyon]

We had that problem with the first one we used.  They took 20% deposit when it should be 15% and asked for the balance weeks ahead.  We knew no better at the time.  The lovely one I use now takes the balance one week before and gives us 5% discount on top of P&O.

 

I still haven't worked out Poirot on the Nile!!

Edited April 22, 2022 by jeanlyon

[davecttr]

1 hour ago, jeanlyon said:

We had that problem with the first one we used.  They took 20% deposit when it should be 15% and asked for the balance weeks ahead.  We knew no better at the time.  The lovely one I use now takes the balance one week before and gives us 5% discount on top of P&O.

 

I still haven't worked out Poirot on the Nile!!

Thomas C

[paulatsea]

2 hours ago, jeanlyon said:

We had that problem with the first one we used.  They took 20% deposit when it should be 15% and asked for the balance weeks ahead.  We knew no better at the time.  The lovely one I use now takes the balance one week before and gives us 5% discount on top of P&O.

 

I still haven't worked out Poirot on the Nile!!

Neither have I ! 
 

why can’t TA be named here ?  Is that a rule somewhere ? I would like to try the best one that others here have personal experience with.

Edited April 22, 2022 by paulatsea

[jeanlyon]

He's put it above - Thomas C