oligopoly

I would say 100% it's this. There's 1 staff member for up to, perhaps 10 kids in the session. If there were 2 more staff members then it would be more than manageable for kids to be left. I even joekd with my wife that they could even charge extra for "babysitting" and most of the families would happily pay for it.

What I forgot to include previously is on our last cruise our kid was 3. We were able to put him in kids club the whole day if we wanted to (apart from collecting for lunch and dinner before returning him). This service was available up to 11pm or even later from memory. This gave us total flexibility on what we wanted to do on the ship and meant we could take him to dinner if we wanted or have adults only time if we wanted. We never put him in for the whole day - we want to spend time with him and explore the fun of the ship. But we chose P&O to give us the option of having a break from him. In hindsight we should have postponed this trip for the third time and waited till Kids club was back to normal.

We got back from Britannia last Sunday and I can say - without exaggeration - it was one of the worst holidays we've ever had. We loved the ports, the food, the entertainment but the provision of kids club was a disappointing farce and ruined the experience for everyone in our group. Our 8 year old had only 1 kids club session a day. It lasts around 2 hours (and the staff ask you to pick them up early!). It's either a day one or an evening one - the latter is just watching a film. At least you can leave the 8 year old while you do something else... Our 4 year old had 2 sessions a day but an adult has to stay the whole time. After a couple of days of making glittery pirate hats it gets old quick. But the worst part is the lack of planning. There are no adult seats available. So you need to either sit on a kids chair or sit on the floor. No refreshments other than water. One of these 2 daily sessions is invariably in the evening. Who is going to choose to take their kid to said kids club over going for dinner or a show? Perhaps I'm a bad parent for thinking this, I don't know. The extra dining options (limelight) are adults only, so unless an adult fancies dining alone then you can't take advantage of these extras... I recognise that a holiday with young children (in fact life in general with young children!) is a compromise but asking children to play ball while you drag them along to dinner is emotionally draining for everyone and felt like a channel 4 documentary experiment. The looks from other diners/theatre goers while our children make normal children noise was awful. We felt like saying "don't blame us - blame P&O". Even when kids club returns to normal I'd have to think long and hard about whether I'd want to do this again, such was the bad experience.

Thanks for the clarification, everyone

Is there any reason you guys are doing them in person? A government recognised LFT at home is good enough, right? That's what I did recently prior to a flight to the US and was very smooth process.