terrierjohn

2 hours ago, Kittyonions said:

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. Have decided to go ahead and book with our usual TA because it appears to be a popular cruise. Although not until June 2025, the car parking has already been removed as one of the select fare options. Does anyone know if parking4cruises is still a reliable option?

P4C is still a good option, very reliable and usually quite a bit cheaper than CPS.

3 hours ago, Peanut006 said:

I have an automatic self charging hybrid Hyundai Kona. Only had it five months but I really like it. 
 

Michelle

Will new hybrid car sales also be banned by 2035 I wonder?

2 hours ago, lincslady said:

Is the country honestly going to be ready for all electric cars when it should be?  I find it hard to believe that everyone with a car will be able to charge it as and when needed, whether at home or 'on the road' the way things are at present.  Opinions,  please.

Probably not, but it's quite likely that the second hand value of petrol and diesel cars will by then exceed the cost of a new electric car.

35 minutes ago, 9265359 said:

 

You have utterly misunderstood P&O's fares.

 

The Select fare is higher because it has a number of benefits including, to quote P&O, "First priority for dining style on ships offering both freedom and Club Dining, and first priority for seating time and table size for Club Dining".

 

"First priority" - a key phrase you seem to have completely overlooked.

 

Saver fares are not excluded from requesting a particular type of dining or time of dining, but those requests can only be done onboard and those requests obviously come after the process of meeting the first priority requests of Select fare passengers.

 

Select fares do have other benefits, saver fares cannot be transferred if you find you can no longer travel on thOSE dates, and they normally don't have any OBC.

9 hours ago, AchileLauro said:

A rollator is no substitute for an evacuation chair.

Providing your own evacuation chair would not be a solution as you need at least two trained able bodied persons to safely operate even the most basic of evacuate chairs on a staircase.

I was interested to notice that my new wheelchairs user guide gives detailed operating instructions about how to safely use it on stairs, it does require two people though.

So perhaps the absence of an evacuation chair should not prevent wheelchair users from sailing, as long as there are adequate crew, and a lightweight wheelchair.

9 hours ago, zap99 said:

We are going on ships excursions in Madeira and Lisbon. We don't normally, but they were quite good value...30% seniors discount. We got 10% seniors discount on the cruise as well. We have Britannia booked for June, but feel a September RC coming on. Off to town today. As normal Bank, shops, coffee, Lunch. As its Friday, spoons may have the white table cloths out.😂

What is this seniors discount, and how does one go about receiving it?

1 minute ago, Eglesbrech said:

They are so annoying aren’t they. One of my relative answers the phone with “you have reached the office of the telecom ombudesman”. Works every time.

I was very impressed with my new Samsung phone the other day, or maybe it was Google security, but I was warned that an incoming call was a Suspected scam, and enabled me to ignore and block the number.

I had inadvertently given my phone number to one of those annoying ads that pop up at the foot of a news item. I thought it was a Martin Lewis article about whether to fix my energy or not, but turned out to be for some likely non existent gadget to get subscription TV channels for free, and probably illegal as well. Although I had deleted as much as I could, it probably still had my phone number with some slick seller keen to secure a sale.

15 hours ago, Cathygh said:

There's a cruise to the Canaries on Ventura on 5th November that I have been tracking since July. The price was stable until a week ago, (8 weeks prior to sailing, if my Maths is right) when the price for a balcony went up from £1169 to £1399 and, as of yesterday, is now £1599.This is for a saver fare on the P&O website. There seems to be a fair few empty cabins so it will be interesting to see if the price drops. BTW the price for a balcony saver price until a week ago was £1449, last week it  was £1649 and is now £1929, but when I clicked through to book it shows balconies are sold out. 

There needs to be apparently available cabins to accomodate those who have booked saver fares. So even when there are available cabins showing, the cruise could be sold out.

1 hour ago, TigerB said:

 

That forms part of the policy from 2020, mentioned in post #102, in that mobility scooters should be stored in the cabin; it appears P&O are, as @9265359 writes in that post, now enforcing that policy to the letter.  The trouble is, they are now including power wheelchairs in the same category as mobility scooters, and using a 'one size fits all' approach when, as I have alluded to in previous posts, one size doesn't fit all.

There is little doubt that a powechair, with its shorter wheelbase, will be far more manoeuvrable than a scooter, and much more likely to cope in a partially accessible cabin. But common sense and P&O management is not something you often see.

As for scooters and wheelchairs littering the corridors, this is something I rarely see nowadays, and certainly not on P&O, but we do see frequently on Princess.

2 hours ago, 9265359 said:

 

Or they simply wanted to make the restaurant look less old fashioned.

 

It is a rare restaurant that has tablecloths these days, and that isn't just the pubs you might be familiar with, but also restaurants with Michelin stars.

Maybe, but fine restaurants will have solid polished wooden tables, whereas cruise ships probably have veneered tables or possibly laminate ones.

4 hours ago, scouse mouse said:

How comfortable are the beds on Azura?  We’re just back from a cruise on Anthem of the Seas and the beds were rock hard (in my opinion).  Luckily I’d brought painkillers for my aching bones.  I know bed comfiness is subjective but just wanted peoples opinions so I can pack enough painkillers if needed.

Oh the joys of growing older.

We have sailed mainly on Ventura, Azura's sister ship, and I find her beds are a bit too hard for me, however I always asked the steward if he can put a quilt under the bedsheet, and that makes it more comfortable.

1 hour ago, FangedRose said:

But the op specifically states that they want to guarantee that they are seated together, they also they want this Select Fare benefit without paying for it. Cheeky is at the lower end of adjectives I could have used!

I am not aware that P&O operate a ranked tier system for any of their passengers, even if in the lowest category inside cabin on a saver fare all passengers should be treated the same. As long as the passenger accepts the possible dining limitations, they should be treated the same in all other respects, and be able to switch dining if there is space available.

5 hours ago, yorkshirephil said:

Always remember going to the outside toilet in my house, I always looked forward to the cool damp weather then as the squares of paper were softer when they were damp. Much better than the izal bog roll at school. It was much better as tracing paper though, so I guess every cloud has a silver lining.

Anyone else remember Bronco toilet rolls?

2 hours ago, Eddie99 said:

We picked up some apples from a “help yourself” box outside a house on our walk this morning.  Blackberries in the freezer from a previous walk.  Crumble incoming!  Archetypical English/British cuisine. 😋 

It’ll be tomorrow - we have strawberries that need eating today

It must have been crumble Sunday today, I also made Blackberry and Apple crumble for lunch. My crumble mix is 3-2-1 flour fat sugar.

1 hour ago, LifeonMars said:

I had to  to renew entitlement to the  shareperks app every 3 months with proof of ownership of shares held when booking new cruises 

 

According to the App only US broking platforms are able to be linked to stockperks. So unless or until that changes UK nominee account holders will have to send a new proof of ownership in every 3 months.

3 hours ago, Vampiress88 said:

Booked holiday two years ago and the full payment is due Sunday and we have decided we are happy to cancel and lose deposit. 
 

problem is I don’t know how to. I’ve tried to call and after being on hold 46 mins then it hung up on me 

That's why booking through a good quality on line cruise TA is the best  option, I would just ring or e-mail them and they would do all the necessary work.

2 hours ago, zap99 said:

We don't touch a thing  in the buffet without washing our hands afterwards. We use a tissue to touch menus and wipe cutlery and salt/pepper pots. Lots of slobs out there.

Cutlery comes wrapped in a napkin  which will have been handled in the galley, but so has all the crockery. We don't use salt or pepper, so no problem for us there, and so far we have not gone down with noro, maybe we have been lucky, or possibly our less fastidious life style ensures our immune system is operating at peak performance.

25 minutes ago, 9265359 said:

 

And Carnival gets a bucketload of bad publicity tipped over its head - not sure that's a win for them.

 

 

Report from a doctor, which if they have confined you to the cabin because you have noro then you will have, so not sure you think people wont have it.

Carnival has had loads of bad publicity over the years, from illegally dumping polluted waste water, through paying crew way below average, to loads of noro outbreaks, missed ports etc, and yet they have survived them all and seem to have no problem in filling their cruise ships.

So I doubt that this very minor UK noro outbreak is likely to have the top management in the US worried, that is of course if they have even heard about it.

30 minutes ago, bbtablet said:

Many thanks for the tip - I have not heard of this product before. Looked it up and ordered on ebay straight away - it will arrive in time for my upcoming cruise - just hope we don't need it!

I find paracetamol is a great first defense against colds, flu, upset stomach as well as headaches and general pain relief. It may well be a placebo effect, but it works for me, and is a heck of a lot cheaper than proprietary medicines.

1 hour ago, 9265359 said:

 

Hard to say, as if any cruise company was in a situation that it would not win in court, then I strongly doubt it would let the case get as far as a public judgement as the damage in lost future bookings and cancellations would be far far more costly than anything they paid out to the claimant.

 

Far more likely is that such a case would be settled out of court with an NDA and nobody would ever be able to discover that the payment had been made.

 

And wasn't the Thomson case the one where people had been staying on all inclusive holidays and then claiming that they ate nowhere else and thus it must have been the food on site that had caused them to be ill, but social media posts showed that they had not been telling the truth about being sick.

 

The Thomson court case was a cruise on Thomson Spirit which from the Judges summary was well and truly destroyed. So clearly TUI thought it was important to test the case in the courts  even with the risk of what a loss might do to their reputation.

Of course it was probably helped by the poor view that the judiciary currently have regarding class actions.

1 hour ago, 9265359 said:

 

That isn't how it works in the UK - just look at all the restaurants with one, two, or zero 'scores on the door' for their hygiene rating, and all those would simply be closed down rather than being given a poor score if the 'don't sail' approach was taken.

 

 

A law firm taking on a 'no win, no fee' case doesn't make any money if they don't win...

 

 

As before, civil cases are decided on the balance of probabilities - and boarding a ship in summer when norovirus cases in general are low, but the ship has where hundreds of people who have suffered from it this cruise, and hundreds the last cruise  and hundreds the previous, etc. etc.

 

Hmm... that's not hard to decide where the person likely caught it.

 

 

Nope.

 

The only defence the cruise company has is that is was following established hygiene protocols to prevent it being transmitted to its guests - and from my experience it might very well struggle to do that with the lacklustre and random way the cleaning and other procedures were being followed by staff.

 

You may well be right, BUT how many cruise lines in the UK have been sued and lost for a noro outbreak? 

Thomson successfully defended one in 2015.

9 hours ago, Mrsmas said:

You do know that some people in wheelchairs can walk it's not faking i can walk around a cabin and to an extent a small distance round the ship but need a wheelchair off the ship for enjoying excursions. I have an electric wheelchair which is basically a manual wheelchair with a battery pack that you remove to charge but that's not even acceptable. Their treatment of the disabled is shocking and for that reason I will never choose this cruise line again

 

I do agree that the way P&O is handling this mobility wheelchair and scooter issue, as well as the allocation of evacuation chairs, shows an amazing lack of understanding of the needs of their disabled passengers. It may well be part of a desire to control the number of mobility devices, but as usual P&Os heavy handed way of doing things is making things far worse.

They really need to think about asking their disabled passengers to get a clearer understanding of just what their needs and requirements are, rather than going off half *****, as usual.

I seem to remember that P&O said the 1% of passengers referred to the number of confirmed cases on disembarcation and since noro normally lasts 2 days that may be correct, and of course it did not count crew.

8 minutes ago, TigerB said:

 

Exactly!  

Both you and I, as husbands and carers of a partner with a seriously debilitating and life limiting disability, know only too well how hard it is navigating through life as it is, and trying to ensure our partners are not disadvantaged any more than they already are; so this new policy by P&O is a real kick in the teeth.

If you read down almost to the end you will find the following, it would make more sense to have that as a mich earlier paragraph.

"If you’ve filled it in previously and your circumstances have changed, please fill it in again. If your circumstances have not changed, you don't need to do anything".

3 hours ago, Bin man said:

Just had 5 emails from P and O about their disability form filling. Guess they are covering their backs  ?

Ditto.