terrierjohn

Not negative, we have sailed 5 times with P&O so they have something for us. However having experienced US cruise lines I wanted to state my view about how a US cruise passenger may experience P&O..

 

Out of interest Dai how many US cruise lines have you tried in order to be able to offer a balanced opinion without simply supporting P&O whatever?

15-love to KY I believe.;)

Well if some on P&O do not like the sailaways, there are others who have been on other lines....... With very big boats who are very jealous:-

 

Taken from a thread posted today

 

We sailed the Oasis and on 12/18 we were docked next to P&O Ventura in St Maarten. The departing party of the Ventura was unbelievable and unfortunately I was not able to video the festivities on board the Ventura viewable from our ship. The Frankie Valli music "By, By Baby" and the guest party on the top deck of the ship made for a sailaway like we have never seen before. We are hoping someone from our ship, or their ship or the Celeberity or Holland America ship on the other side of the Ventura got the video and can post it on you tube. Thanks

Quite right Dai that is a great sailaway sound, but I think you should pop back to this thread and advise them it was most likely the Bay City Rollers version that was being played on Ventura.

Sorry I do not know the answer but you could try e-mailing to reservations@pocruises.com I assume they can give you the correct answer.

As regards whether you would find P&O better than Princess I imagine not, but they do provide a reasonable quality main stream product, just not up there with Celebrity, Cunard or HAL.

You will need to consider that they are geared primarily to UK passengers and even their Caribbean cruises out of Barbados or world cruise sectors will assume flights to and from the UK, and getting P&O customer service to adjust their prices to reflect different flights might be a bit too much for them to cope with.

However best of luck if you do decide to cruise with them.

Our cruise is some months away but I started to enter our details last week, it took all my details OK but when I came to enter my wifes it brought up my passport data and my emergency contact data, and if I changed them on hers then mine were wrong.

I assumed a Princess malfunction and will revisit it in the new year.

Our experience with Celebrity's accessible shore excursions has been very positive so far, from the slick booking arrangements via shorexaccess@rccl.com, through to the excellent accessible vehicles ranging from Mercedes Sprinter vehicles with a rear access lift, up to full size 50 seater coaches with varying types of access lift ramps to take either wheelchairs or scooters.

My wife needs lift access but she can transfer to a normal seat once on board, and her wheelchair can then be folded and stowed, this way the tours can take more than the normal 3 or 4 wheelchairs.

Our cruises have been on the Eclipse from Southampton to the Med and the Baltic, so the comments about Europe not having ADA equivalent tours is in our opinion outdated.

Prices do vary and the tours using the small vehicles are obviously the highest priced, but we enjoyed a panoramic scenic tour of Rome with some free time in St Peters square which was combined with an AB minimal walking tour in a full size coach and was relatively inexpensive. Similarly in the Baltic we also enjoyed low priced tours in Stockholm and Helsinki.

We just hope that Celebrity continue to offer similar excursions on any future cruises we do with them.

I was just going to say the same thing. The two RCI ships weve been on have had a wide cross section of ages with attractions and events tailored to different age groups.

 

With Ventura they called her a Family Friendly ship but in reality it had the Cirque School ( now removed ) and the kids clubs. RCI has surfing machines, mini golf, in line skating tracks, H2O water parks, rock climbing plus the kids clubs. RCI seem to have a much stronger strategy when planning their ships and marketing them. P&Os strategy seems to be 'dont do anything to offend their long standing client base'.

As I said earlier in this thread P&O board and shareholders made the wrong decision when they decided to the Carnival takeover rather than sticking with the Royal Caribbean merger.

Actually, it has just struck me that your answer encapsulates what is wrong with P & O thinking. You immediately think of facilities for children. I am talking about facilities for adults! But not the doddery OAPs! P & O need to realise that they will soon have died off and there will be nobody to take their place. They have to focus on younger cruisers. The oldies prefer the small ships like those of FO anyway.

 

 

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Hey not so fast there in condemning all OAP's as doddering oldies who dislike all playground style facilities. We discovered the wonders of the Florida theme parks long after our own children had flown the nest, and we were then able to introduce our son and grandchildren to the wonders of Disney.

Whilst I may be a bit too old to participate on a flowrider or bungee trampoline I think I would enjoy watching others, and I am sure I am will enjoy some of the Quantum features which will be on the new Anthem OTS, as will many others who might have tried Britannia had it had anything worthwhile to offer.

Although the shareholders, as they always do, made the final decision in their vote, this was not until Carnival made an improved final offer to the P&O board and agreed on a string of demands from the P&O board which included a dual listing of Carnival in the US and UK. The P&O board then made the decision to recommend the Carnival offer to its shareholders.

I imagine that the large institutional investors did exercise some influence on the P&O board, but the board could have tried equally as hard to improve the Royal Caribbean merger terms if they had wanted to, clearly, IMO, they chose the easier and wrong option.

I cannot agree that P&O sailaways are tacky, toe curlingly embarrassing, full of Vera Lynn and even WW1 songs or only intended for old Grannies and also poorly attended. In general I have found them to be attended by all age ranges and very popular especially in reasonable weather and very entertaining, sometimes hilariously funny and also requiring expert timing.

I have recounted this story before but IMO its worth repeating. Whilst on the Arcadia in the Caribbean we were berthed alongside one of the German Aida lines ships, both ships nose in to the shore. We were departing first and expertly using our azipods and bow thrusters Arcadia went astern and proceeded to do a half circle around the long berth until Arcadia's stern was just alongside the Aida ship. By this time our sailaway party was in full flag waving swing and we were well into the Music Man routine and had just reached the Dambusters segment as the Captain brought us to a stop and put us into forward motion.

OK so it was exceedingly jingoistic but it went down well with all of us gathered around the stern pool singing our heads off, and lets face it we Brits of whatever race or colour are the world champs at jingoism.

I don't often agree with Dai but I do rather enjoy watching, and listening, to a good GBS, and certainly have not heard Vera Lynn recently, we had some great sailaways on our Azura cruise in October and Rod and the Bay city rollers were amongst the oldest they played.

I can't quite bring myself to join in the flag waving but I'm sure the residents of Valletta, who lined the harbour in good numbers as we sailed out on a very sunny afternoon, rather enjoyed it all.

....not the best.

Looking at the changes to the Captain's Club it appears that only suite passengers are ever likely to achieve either of the two new tiers. IMO this probably means that over time Celebrity will migrate all their worthwhile benefits upwards into these new tiers leaving the remaining riff raff (that's us, the majority of their passengers) to reminisce about the good old days at their one and only jam packed Captains Club morning coffee break complete with biscuits, whilst the cruising Gordon Gekkos will be sheltered from the common herd enjoying their daily cocktail parties on the bridge with the Captain.

I must ask my shrink why I am such a cynic. :rolleyes::D:cool:

We have not been in a Concierge HC cabin but I believe they are identical to the standard ones on deck 6 or 7, and they are large enough to easily accomodate a wheelchair or scooter.

However the shower area only has one drain outlet and although it is set in the lowest area of the floor you can get water spreading about the floor, especially when at sea, there is another drain across the doorway and we have never had problems with it spilling out into the bedroom. However if you ask your steward I am sure he would leave you extra bathroom mats to try and contain the seepage.

The problems with P&O date back 10 years when Lord Stirling and Peter Ratcliffe made the monumentally incorrect decision to accept Mickey Arisons offer to buy P&O Princess and absorb it into his Carnival coropration, instead of the original plan to merge with Royal Caribbean.

If they had continued with the RCCL merger we might now have several Solstice class ships sailing under the P&O banner along with a new Quantum class ship in production, which in my view would be far better than Azura Ventura and the proposed Britannia.

But money always talks.

We had 6 credits and on the old system with 2 credits per 14 day cruise we would have made Elite after 2 more cruises, we normally book an AX accessible cabin, we would have needed 36 extra points for parity but got nothing.

On the new points system we have 180 and will now need 3 more cruises to reach Elite, unless of course we switch to Concierge or Aqua, but it won't stop us booking Celebrity, however I doubt we will book the higher grade just to reach Elite sooner.

What he said. C deck every time.

...............and the prices are identical to all the other standard balcony decks, BUT you can only guarantee to get a C deck cabin by paying the higher price to choose your cabin.

However there were lots of lucky getaway customers on our Oct Azura cruise who were allocated a C deck cabin.

From recent pictures of P&O's Britannia, Royal's sister, there is a pool forward on the Promenade deck, BUT this is in the crew only area. I assume Royal Princess also features this crew pool.

The common thread of pricing misery raises its head again. Price reductions have always been there as departure date looms, so is it that the reductions are now greater or is it the way that Vantage was sold that causes so much anger?

 

Many people in the review section on here and other sites appear to be so angry about the pricing structure that they are vowing not to cruise with P & O again.

All cruise lines reduce prices at some time before a cruise sails. This has been the case for as long as I have been cruising. It is more noticeable now with the Internet. If you want you could just wait until the week before. If you can go at the drop of a hat you will get a good deal, but this is not new. On the other hand you could miss out altogether.

 

Whatever system is in place there will always be late deals. That is just the way it is.

We need to book early to secure an accessible cabin and our recent cruise experience has been with Celebrity and P&O.

My complaint with P&O is that their launch prices, even with their advertised reductions and extra goodies are generally the highest prices they advertise.

However the launch prices from Celebrity always offer a good discount from the brochure price, and their prices do tend to increase further over the next 12 months, which means their last minute deals are rarely less than we paid.

The result is a positive customer satisfaction with Celebrity and a negative one with P&O, and will clearly affect our future bookings until P&O see the light.

It shows lousy taste since the quality of P&O duvet covers is at best mediocre, if people must steel bedding at least they should pick cruise lines with quality products.;):rolleyes:

[quote:

Originally Posted by lenbest

Any hotel in UK would offer liquid soap as normal practice.

Shower Gel is not assumed to be a standard amenity in the USA. Bar soap is the norm.

I am not a fan of shower gel especially the dispenser variety and have always assumed that hotels only use it because its cheaper, refill and re-use vs throw away part used soap. So I always request bar soap if its available.

But the P&O telephone line is not a Premium Rate line, Nick?

It is certainly a premium number to those of us who have free evening, weekend or in my case 24/7 geographical calls; and 0845 numbers do charge a lot more than normal geographic numbers anyway.

We used the RCI parking on a recent cruise on Independence and I MUCH prefer the P&O system which has always been so much more straightforward and quicker. We were parked at the far end of the RCI car park so had to walk back quite a way with our luggage - or at least it felt like that with heavy luggage. With P&O, we would just have pulled up and our luggage and car would have been whisked away while we made our way onto the ship to start our cruise. We find the whole experience with CPS completely stress-free.

When we have used the same parking for X Eclipse we have always unloaded our luggage at the unloading bays and then gone to park our car, that way you only have hand luggage to tote.

How do you fix it before the next dry dock? Don't make it available for booking next cruise and close it for repairs. If repairs are done in 2 days then you have a good cabin to move someone to if they complain about their current one. Gradually they will all get fixed.

That sounds like a great idea, X could call it a "Rolling Refurb" and use it as a marketing gimmick, it would also reduce the need to offer so many cheap late availability prices if they held back 10 to 20 cabins each cruise until all cabins had been spruced up.:cool:

I think Dai's memory is failing a little or perhaps he is being a little nostalgic, certainly on our 2012 P&O cruise we had 3 shows on a number of nights because we found the 7:00/7:30 show suited us best.

However on our two 2013 cruises we only had 3 shows advertised on one night in the Horizon mag., and the one on our Oct cruise. ended up being cancelled.