Selbourne ‘Live’ from Aurora’s 2024 Grand Tour

[GOQ]

37 minutes ago, Bill Y said:

Oh dear, it appears to be going backwards compared to May. Do they know that you are Priority? There was a lady walking up the queue shouting priority in May she told us go straight to the departures door where the doorman saw our boarding pass with "priority" on it and opened the door for us that was at 11:45 but I imagine on your cruise there is a high number priority boarders.

 

I too can recommend the Space Centre, DW also enjoyed it. Being the USA a wheelchairs will be catered for,

Yes I can confirm in US they tend to look after disabled passengers. The transfer bus from the Kennedy Space centre to the Apollo Launch site has wheelchair spaces.    

[Son of Anarchy]

59 minutes ago, david63 said:

No doubt it is due to "operational reasons"😀

99% of people agree 🤣

[mrsgoggins]

I'm keen to know if Selbourne and his good lady are now on board. I'm sitting in a local hostelry with others who feel that P&O could have done better (we have a few suggestions 😉). The queues were horrendous outside Mayflower. 

 

We are all laughing though 😁

[Ilovemygarden]

Just looked at this for the first time today.  I cannot believe you are on page 3 already and haven’t even boarded yet!   This just goes to show how eager we are to hear of your adventures and how much we value your honest and balanced reporting.

Look forward to reading all about it.

[Angel57]

My friend who had 1230 boarding and who got there at 1200 was allowed on straight away…..

[Harry Peterson]

11 minutes ago, mrsgoggins said:

I'm keen to know if Selbourne and his good lady are now on board. I'm sitting in a local hostelry with others who feel that P&O could have done better (we have a few suggestions 😉). The queues were horrendous outside Mayflower. 

 

We are all laughing though 😁

Enjoy your long cruise too. What a great time to escape our weather.
 

Good tip of yours about buying an internet package to download the newspapers - we’ve got subscriptions to the Times and Telegraph, along with a subscription to Magzter which pulls in the Guardian/Observer and the Independent as well, along with hundreds of magazines that we never find time to read. On a long cruise with the possibility of only a small number of good lecturers that would keep my wife and me very happy on uneventful sea days!

[paulatsea]

2 hours ago, Selbourne said:

Well I’d love to start with a positive, but it’s disorganised chaos at Mayflower. Arrived at 12pm with 12.30pm priority boarding. Still stood outside in the cold at 1pm. More later….

When we went on Aurora on the December 1st  canaries cruise (dec 23 last) they let everyone in almost straight away to check in and we just sat inside waiting for our turn to board - like the old days ! So no queuing outside.

Priority boarded first and then by a combination of arrival time/peninsula status and not necessarily what was on the boarding pass !

 

It worked very well.

 

Good luck - thanks for sharing your adventure with us.

Edited January 3 by paulatsea

[bobstheboy]

Looking forward to Selbourne's travel experiences. We are cruising ourselves on Saturday on Azura, no internet package but data when alongside via our mobiles. He will still have another 7 weeks when we return !

[purplesea]

7 minutes ago, bobstheboy said:

Looking forward to Selbourne's travel experiences. We are cruising ourselves on Saturday on Azura, no internet package but data when alongside via our mobiles. He will still have another 7 weeks when we return !

If you are on board for 2 weeks we will overlap by a day as we board Azura on th 19th. Have a good cruise.

[grapau27]

3 hours ago, mrsgoggins said:

 

I may give it a go, but expect upside down pictures if I do manage it 😁. I've often felt I owe it to @grapau27 (and others) to join in with the food pics as I always enjoy them, but I'll have to swat up how to do it! 🥴

If you use an Android phone like me it is easy to post your food photos.

As long as you enjoy your food I'm happy for you.

Best wishes and Bon voyage for a wonderful cruise.

Graham.

 

[SeaJane]

I’ll be following this thread and looking forward to reading about your experiences Selbourne. Things clearly didn’t get off to a good start with embarkation, but hope that you were able to board in time to enjoy a leisurely lunch and a welcome drink (or two 🥂🤣) 

[jh1809]

I can only echo what everyone else has said, and wish you a most enjoyable cruise.

[Cathygh]

I wonder if the queues are so long because people have turned up without their yellow fever vaccination or exemption certificate?

The weather here is better than yesterday but still  not that great.

Have a wonderful time @Selbourne

[CarlaMarie]

Her departure with fireworks is live very shortly

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdkIaWoi1es

Edited January 3 by CarlaMarie

[Lancashire Lad 70]

Do have a good cruise. I will be following you with great interest as we are thinking about going on this ship in April this year 

[Sussexboy]

Watching you live on YouTube now! Have a great trip.

Edited January 3 by Sussexboy

[Eddie99]

36 minutes ago, CarlaMarie said:

Her departure with fireworks is live very shortly

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdkIaWoi1es

Yay!

Starting the cruise with a bang! 💥 🎉 

[Selbourne]

Day 1 - Wednesday 3rd January - Embarkation

 

I decided to leave my first update until today, as our embarkation experience was poor and that, along with a couple of other things, didn’t get the cruise off to the best start, so I wanted to wait until I had some positives to balance things out, otherwise it would have put a real damper on my first post from the ship.

 

We had a very easy run down to Southampton with no traffic issues at all during any stage of the journey. As priority boarders our boarding time was 12.30pm, but it was obvious to us that with a long cruise of this nature there would be a lot of other priority boarders, so we aimed to arrive a bit early anticipating that it would be busier than usual. Sadly, it clearly hadn’t been as obvious to CPS, Intercruises and, presumably, P&O as what followed was our worst embarkation experience in many years.

 

Last year we had priority embarkation on Britannia, Iona and Ventura and with all 3 ships, even Iona with 5,750 passengers, from arrival in the CPS drop off lane to boarding the ship was around 20 minutes. The problem started the second we arrived, at just after midday. For the first time ever on Aurora (and unlike on the other 3 ships where we were checked in by CPS almost immediately), we were directed into one of three ‘holding lanes’. I could have lived with this had there been an efficient system, but there wasn’t. When the 3 holding lanes became full, the next 100 or so cars to arrive, as they couldn’t fit in the holding lanes, were directed straight past us to the vehicle handover lanes. We sat there for at least 20 minutes watching car after car arrive after us and jump ahead of us. Only when there was a slight pause in the stream of arrivals did they let any cars out of the holding lanes, but not in the order that they had arrived. We were in the outer of the 3 lanes, the middle lane filled up after we had arrived and yet were called forward before our lane!

 

When we were eventually called forward to the handover lanes, the usual sea of yellow high viz CPS staff that check in the vehicles were nowhere to be seen. We were told to wait in our car and not remove any luggage until the car had been checked. Well we waited and waited and in the end the folk in the cars ahead of us got fed up and started unloading. Eventually 3 CPS staff appeared at the far end of our lane and started working their way along the row. Whilst there were minibuses arriving with CPS drivers to take the cars away, these 3 people were the only staff checking in the cars - hence the long waits. On our 3 cruises last year there had been loads more staff doing this. 

 

Having eventually got the car handed over we then walked over to the terminal entrance to find two queues. One for the early arrivers and one for those who were on time. At this point we were late, but there wasn’t a queue for that! However, even the on time arrivals queue wasn’t moving - at all. We had told the chap marshalling the queue that we were priority boarders and should have been on the ship by now, but were just told to wait in the queue as nobody was going in. We then proceeded to wait in the cold outside for at least 20 minutes, with not a soul entering the terminal and nobody coming along the queue to tell us what the problem was. Eventually, when the queue started moving, we still didn’t get in (there were too many ahead of us, so they stopped access again) but we eventually got close enough to a member of Intercruises staff to ask what the problem was. “The terminal is full”. Thankfully she asked if we’d booked assistance (we had) so she opened a barrier and let us cut through. At assistance I said that I would push my wife on to the ship myself as we’d had enough waiting around, so we checked in and were eventually on the ship almost one and a half hours after we had arrived at the terminal. 

 

The next disappointment was the priority boarders lunch. Unlike on Britannia and Ventura, where it had been a lovely waiter served lunch, it was a buffet. So having taken all that time queueing to get on the ship, no sooner had I sat down, I had to get up and join another slow moving queue to get food. The priority boarders lunch on Iona was also a buffet, but a very decent one that was a big step up from the priority boarders buffets of old. Sadly, on Aurora it was the old style buffet, so very unappealing. I had to ask a waiter to assist me as I couldn’t hold and serve onto two plates with nowhere to rest them. Wish we hadn’t bothered but, thankfully, we joined a table with another couple who were also equally unimpressed with the whole arrival experience so far, but having got that off our chests we moved on and ended up having a nice chat with them. 

 

After lunch we went to our cabin. Although the corridor and lift areas were full of cases, none of ours was to be seen. Our steward Antonio arrived to introduce himself and said he would look out for our cases. We were starting to get ever so slightly anxious when 5pm came and we still hadn’t had a single one of our cases (I kept checking outside) but thankfully they then started arriving and, like buses, all then turned up in quick succession! I unpacked everything and managed to get most of what we wanted to be hung in the wardrobes, thanks to some wire hangers from Antonio.

 

We have an issue with the cabin in that, like Premier Inn hotels, someone in their infinite wisdom has decided that disabled people need low beds. My wife is going to really struggle getting out of the bed and transferring to her wheelchair without my help, as she cannot pull herself up easily. I asked our steward if they had some blocks to go under the legs to raise the bed, but he spoke to the deck manager who said that it couldn’t be done, but to speak to reception? The added problem of the low bed is that our larger suitcases won’t go underneath it!

 

By this point, I am a somewhat fed up and not in the best of moods, so it was nice to have a firework display from the quayside as we left. I hadn’t expected much given comments that I’d read about them, but we thought that they were really good and a nice gesture. We then went to Anderson’s for a quick drink before dinner. 

 

Luckily we have been allocated second sitting Club dining but, for some odd reason, on this cruise first and second sitting are at 6pm and 8pm, rather than the usual 6.30pm and 8.30pm. No idea why. We are on a table for 8 but only one of the other three couples turned up. Thankfully we got on really well with the one couple that did turn up and dinner itself was fine. 

 

After dinner we went to the 10pm show (again, odd times, the shows are 8pm and 10pm, not the usual 8.30pm and 10.30pm). It was The Privateers, who we haven’t seen before and their performance was superb. We both thoroughly enjoyed it. After that I deposited my wife back to the cabin and did just over 3 laps of the promenade deck (1 mile). I was the only person out there! The promenade deck on Aurora is exactly as one should be. Very wide, fully covered so that it can be used in all weathers, and with none of the high glass screens that surrounded the promenade deck on Iona. 

 

Having thought that the negatives were now behind us, when I returned to the cabin, with the ship now moving a bit, we have a very loud creaking coming from the ceiling above the bed. Not again, I thought. We were plagued with this on Ventura. I shall have to report that tomorrow as well, as it’s going to keep me awake. Not sure that WD40 will cure it this time!

Edited January 4 by Selbourne

[cublet]

Hello,

 

I hope I'm not reopening an old sore, but can I ask how you got on at check-in with your vaccination exemption certificate / Dr's letter?

 

Regards,

 

Cublet

[Selbourne]

5 minutes ago, cublet said:

Hello,

 

I hope I'm not reopening an old sore, but can I ask how you got on at check-in with your vaccination exemption certificate / Dr's letter?

 

Regards,

 

Cublet

I only showed the official yellow fever exemption for my wife and they accepted it. As I had predicted, the GP letter that every single pre-cruise communication had insisted that we needed, and cost us £30 to obtain, was not required! 

[Angel57]

@Selbourne - so pleased to hear that you and Lady S are safely on board, albeit with a few issues.

Could you maybe ask the steward for a second mattress for your wife as opposed to raising the bed (altho I appreciate that doesn’t help the suitcase issue, but the steward can store those for you).

Thanks so much for posting an update and enjoy the adventure!

 

[Purdey16]

Selbourne sorry to read embarkation was a shambles and your lunch not relaxing at all, just a buffet is not what I would of wanted, I’m pleased you got 2nd sitting and hope you get on well with your table couples, with the low bed situation can a extra mattress topper be put on top to lift it up some more ? or will that still be to soft to help mrs S push up .

The changing of dinner times is odd as it was the old times on the December cruise.

Our boarding was delayed for a hour or so because the air bridge broke but they squeezed us all in side out of the cold and gave us chocolates 😋 , I do hope things are right for you soon.

[Josy1953]

@Selbourne I  am sorry that there was chaos with your boarding but I hope that everything goes more smoothly now that you are on finally on board.  Enjoy the rest your cruise and make some good memories.

[Interestedcruisefan]

Not a good start at all

 

Are you going to tell your steward initially about the creaking? They may be able to tell you what's causing it and if it's ongoing!

 

I guess him not being able to help with the low bed isn't a good sign though

 

(I sense a new better cabin for you at some stage)

 

Once you speak to someone senior enough in amongst all this to understand - I would mention you are doing a live report and how much you were hoping everything you could tell everyone was positive

 

As it is through no fault of your own this thread would put people off cruising not warm them to it

 

Good luck getting everything sorted asap Selbourne

 

 

[TigerB]

What an absolute shambles with the boarding, despite with the blue badge no doubt being visible on the dashboard and your good lady being in a wheelchair, that it would be obvious that you required assistance at both the vehicle drop off and at the terminal.

 

As predicted, they accepted the general certificate, and you wasted £30. That's about fifteen Doom Bars you could have had! Something for the email that will no doubt be directed to P&O Towers in March.

 

Interesting about the bed given they are 60cm high on the newer ships. We're on Aurora next year so I will note that.

 

Glad you liked The Privateers; they are really good and I've been hoping for their inclusion on one of our future cruises.

 

I hope the creaking gets sorted and you have some more positives to report back on.