terrierjohn

Britannia has a great pool deck with big pools, and a separate adults only serenity pool, but no prom deck. Arvia has a great prom deck but teeny weeny pools, although the Sky dome pool does have a swim up bar.

But it will considerably reduce the number of true anytime or freedom places, compared with the older system of having 2 MDRs for Anytime Dining and one for Traditional Dining.

You have obviously never been on Iona or Arvia..

Reading the Princess boards, there seem to be quite a high percentage of passengers who prefer TD, and who have not enjoyed the DMW version of dining. Most Princess ships have 3 equal sized dining rooms which makes this switch possible. However with only one third of dining seats available for freedom dining, I guess there will still be complaints from many, including me.

I wonder how Coral and Island will operate this system?

It also states the following, ........ "Now whether guests prefer an early seating every evening, or change things up every night, or even change their mind, these flexible dining options ensure that their dining preference is effortlessly accommodated.” which reads as though you could switch your dining preference mid cruise.

It wont come into effect until Sept 14th sailings.

It's about time but unfortunately we sail on 5th May, so the new system won't be operational then. However I do hope Princess will be flexible enough to increase the capacity of the walk up anytime option when they realise their old Anytime Dining system is still preferred by the majority of their guests.

Possibly to fall into line with Princess, who are also part of Carnival.

These marketing techniques are cruise industry wide, its pointless pointing your finger at P&O, and seemingly suggesting that they are alone in pursuing this policy.

Since noro is a disease passed from person to person, highly infectious and likely brought on board by a passenger, then I would expect it to hit early in the cruise rather than later. Unless a passenger is unlucky enough to contract noro from a cafe or restaurant vist whilst ashore. .

Moley commented a while ago that P&O were considering allowing OBC to be used against pre cruise bookings, I wonder if that is still likely.

We were pestered with them earlier on in the year, it was a bit too cold for them to have come in from outside, and I assumed they possibly came in on a christmas gift house plant.

Yes, although they are classified as Millenium class. Celebrity has come a long way since we first sailed on Millenium in 2008, they just had the 4 Millenium ships and were due to take delivery of Solstice at that time, whilst the last 3 Century class ships were in the process of joining the TUI/RC joint venture Mein Schiff, plus the 2 R class ships that were eventually demerged to form Azamara. Now the 4 millennium class are still sailing, along with 5 Solstice class vessels and the first 4 Edge class ships, plus the 3 Xpedition ships.

Beach house availability is interesting, we booked on board and could only get an 8:15 slot. I kept checking, on the app that isn't, but no luck, so went to the beach house desk one lunchtime to see if I could go earliet, and the answer was, "of course what time would you like, is 7:00 OK, certainly sir". So always best to talk to a human.

We only paid £9.20 on our recent Iona cruise. .

You mean you have never had a waiter struggle to know where the table is? Or had the host send you to a table where they were halfway through their meal?

P&O do now attempt to take you to the table, but quite often the waiter/stewards don't know where the table is!!😯

Which if in a different country might be be problematic without passports. We have only experienced this once over 40 cruises, not to us, but a coach in Panama was delayed due to a major traffic accident. The coach was not involved in the accident but was 4 or 5 hours late getting back to port, and the Princess ship waited for their return.

Our last house had a conifer hedge and in the 40 years we lived there we never had any birds nesting in it, we often had blackbirds nesting in the hawthorn hedge, but never the conifer one.

I guess that would be more costly for the cruise line.

But it would be a hell of a climb back up to the crows nest.😉

Loyalty perks must work or cruise lines would not use them, I dont think cruise lines or supermarkets would be such keen users of loyalty/reward cards if they did not believe they increased sales.

No but the daily hold does enable the cruise line to know if someone is likely to default, and their cruise cards can be identified and they can be denied disembarkation until they do arrange payment.

What about Rythm of the rain ---Cascades, It might as well rain until September -- Carole King.