Live Report B225

[Marmaduke]

Many thanks to Walkingdude for taking time to report from the cruise and  giving an overall view. I assume that afternoon tea in the dining room is now a thing of the past, which is a shame as it was the only time you could get a decent hot up of tea. Is the dinning room still open for lunch every day or only on sea days?  Apart from the delay how was the Tui charter, are drinks in economy free this year and do they give out bottles of water or do I need buy some at the airport ?  Do you have to pay to watch the movies ?

[walkingdude]

26 minutes ago, Marmaduke said:

Many thanks to Walkingdude for taking time to report from the cruise and  giving an overall view. I assume that afternoon tea in the dining room is now a thing of the past, which is a shame as it was the only time you could get a decent hot up of tea. Is the dinning room still open for lunch every day or only on sea days?  Apart from the delay how was the Tui charter, are drinks in economy free this year and do they give out bottles of water or do I need buy some at the airport ?  Do you have to pay to watch the movies ?

The TUI flight was fine. They put a free bottle of water with each seat (in PE, at least), the movies/TV was free (in PE - don't know about Economy). Not sure about the MDR because we never used it for lunch or afternoon tea.

[TheBigLebowski]

On 11/9/2022 at 11:30 PM, walkingdude said:

Apologies for no updates since 31 October, but we couldn’t login despite clearing cache, cookies, etc.

We’re now back home. We didn’t, after all, avoid the big C. Two of our party tested positive less than 24 hours after landing, myself included. That would imply that we caught it on the ship, in the coach to the airport, in the airport, or on the plane. My gut feeling now is that there were positive cases on board but pax were not, generally, reporting it for fear of being isolated and ruining their holiday. Thankfully, I don’t feel terribly I’ll, just a thick head cold and some weariness. 
The final few days of our cruise were great, but there were regular interjections of liquid sunshine. St Kitts was wonderful (surprisingly) and no sign of the building works/general rubble mentioned by MegaBear2 earlier on this page. St Lucia was good, but, in hindsight, we chose the wrong beach. St Vincent was a waste of time (just our opinion). We don’t know why P&O stop here rather than, for example, St Maarten which is much nicer. Barbados was great -nwent to Harbour Lights on Carlisle Beach, again.

Had dinner in the Epicurean on our penultimate night and, unfortunately, it wasn’t very good. Big pity as we usually enjoy this restaurant. Had dinner at Sindhu on our final night and it was, thankfully, very enjoyable. Worth the wait and a nice way to finish.

Flight back was delayed by 3 hours, but otherwise all good. We did, however, notice some baggage on the arrivals carousel that was supposed to have gone to Gatwick. Someone was not going to be happy.

Reading some of the earlier posts on this page, whilst we didn’t witness any of the unsavoury events described, we are absolutely sure that they would have happened. I’m continuously surprised by the behaviour of some pax, from being loud, drunk, rude in the buffet, and when trying to exit the lifts, refusing to wash hands after visiting rest rooms, placing towels on loungers before disappearing for several hours, etc. (rant over).

Finally, we heard about lots of “disagreements” between pax and spa personnel over various issues. No surprise because it has happened to us on a previous cruise.

We will now be taking a break from P&O while we consider all of our options. Enjoy your current/next cruises wherever you might be going.

I came back with Covid from this one as well. Tested three days after we left the ship.