Selbourne

1 x P&O at 7 nights (£60), 3 x P&O at 14 nights (£150 each) and 1 x 14 nighter with Cunard ($250 which equates to £200). Soon adds up 👍

Bonkers. I can understand that some people might try to abuse the system and queue jump, but there needs to be some common sense in all this. What happens if you need the loo in a 3 hour queue? I wonder if the US lines with ships the size of Iona and Arvia subject their passengers to 3 hour queue’s? I suspect not as they wouldn’t put up with it like we do.

As far as I recall they’ve always been free for those on Select fares and extra cost for those on Savers. The comment that shuttles are now charged for threw me as I thought there’d been a change! Just checked again and when doing a dummy booking and you get to the two different price columns of Saver and Select, for some reason they no longer list free shuttles amongst the Select fare benefits, which seems a missed opportunity!

I’ll let you know if mine does 😂 We are on her in August 😱 Enjoy the rest of your cruise

Revised booking confirmations now received from TA for all 5 cruises showing the additional £710 OBC. Lovely jubbly 🥂

Glad that you are enjoying the cruise. At the risk of sounding pedantic (as I have made this point a few times), the ship will not be full to capacity as you say. P&O will say the ship is full when there are 5,000 to 5,200 passengers, as that’s the lower berths. Whilst there are kids on board, there won’t be 1,000 of them as it’s term time. In summer school holidays there could well be 6,200 on board! Are shuttle buses no longer free for those paying Select fares? I must have missed that change, although come to think of it I don’t recall seeing it mentioned under the Select fare column when I booked last week?

Agree that the linking is only for dining, but it seems very odd that people in adjacent cabins get different boarding times. There’s a good chance that two couples with a linked booking may be travelling to Southampton together. If they are not priority boarders, surely it makes sense for them to be given the same boarding time or one couple is left hanging around?

Long shot, but have you miss spelt accessibility as you have in your post (you missed the 3rd ‘i’)? accessibility@carnivalukgroup.com is the correct address. I sent them several forms and they were received OK

I’m afraid I’d play merry hell if they tried that with us. They would have had to have physically stopped me from walking straight past them. Did you complain about this afterwards to P&O, as clearly somebody hasn’t briefed the dockside staff about those who have priority boarding? Some of our group are cruising for the first time and we are the only ones with priority boarding. On the basis that you only get one chance to make a first impression, I can see that for some people a 3 hour queue would be their first and last cruise experience!

That’s a nuisance. I have also booked 3 adjacent cabins on deck 10 on Arvia and assumed that the boarding times would be the same. We have linked the bookings. I wonder if that makes any difference?

I believe that daiB has said that you can have the cheese board as well as a dessert and there’s no extra cost? Might be a challenge but one that I’m prepared to accept given all the photos that are being posted which are making me quite envious 😂

Update (as I started this thread). Having tried and failed to use Freetrade, I opted for Hargreaves Lansdown, as you can speak to a human in the U.K. when you get a bit stuck or have a query (as I did), and this made the £11.95 charge worthwhile. They also have a system where they can notify Carnival for you to have the OBC applied, although I didn’t use that in the end. Having set up a Fund & Share Account (no ongoing fees) I bought the required 100 shares. Got a bit confused as they list Carnival as a dollar price and I knew that I needed the U.K. version (which they don’t list), but then I noticed that the price was $1.66 a share so that was a launch price, not a trading price. I gave it a go and, when the bid offer came up, sure enough it was the U.K. version at just under £7 a share (they’ve dropped 40p since, but it matters not). Having pre-loaded my Fund & Share account with enough to cover the shares and fee, the purchase took seconds. I’d heard that the specialist cruise TA that many of us use could arrange the addition of the additional OBC, so asked them to do it. They said (correctly) that the blurb states that Carnival only allow OBC to be applied to cruises once the balance has been paid, so they forwarded the request to Carnival for our July cruise only. This was duly rejected by Carnival as I had supplied the contract note from the share purchase, which doesn’t count apparently! Many thanks to Brianl who told me where to find the Nominee Statement (as it’s not at all clear on the HL website) and having saved that as a file I decided to email Carnival directly and chance my arm on listing all our 5 future cruises (P&O and Cunard), especially as several posters had reported that they had received their OBC as much as a year in advance (well before the stated balance due date). I sent it off Saturday morning and obviously didn’t expect a reply until yesterday (Monday), but many have said that they got a reply within an hour, so at close of play yesterday having not heard anything I assumed that I must have got something else wrong! Anyhow, this morning in rapid succession I receive 5 separate emails confirming that my shareholder OBC has been applied to ALL 5 future cruises. I have just worked out that the total shareholder OBC that I have received today equals exactly my total outlay for the shares, so they now owe me absolutely nothing and any future value in the shares, however little, is a bonus. We will of course continue to reap further rewards from any future new bookings. Can I take this opportunity to thank everyone for their help and advice with this. A great example of how this forum is gold dust for those with a question about something.

I agree. I don’t give a fig about loyalty tier as a ‘bragging right’ (especially as there are thousands who put our cruise history to shame!) but the few perks can be useful. Priority boarding might be critical on ships like Iona and Arvia if certain speciality restaurants can’t be booked until you are on board (and sell out). The 10% discount is also useful if you are able to book pre-cruise (which it seems that you can’t now on some ships). Having only just scraped into Caribbean pre Covid we have yet to experience a loyalty lunch, so will give that a go in July 🤞

Masks? Oh dear. I thought that we’d seen the end of that.

I may have misunderstood the issue, but just to clarify a few things if it helps; Our first P&O cruise was in 1996 and this doesn’t count towards our loyalty points. Up to and including Caribbean tier (250 nights) there are no requirements for cruise frequency, so you never lose points even if you don’t cruise for many years. Baltic requires 80-200 nights over the 3 preceding years. Ligurian requires 201 nights or more over the 3 preceding years. If you don’t meet these criteria you drop down a tier or 2, but never below Caribbean. I’ve just logged into my P&O account and, in yet another P&O IT glitch, when I click on the tab to view my cruise history it takes me to the generic page about loyalty tiers with no detail on my past cruises 🙄 Edit - I think they might have suspended the Baltic and Ligurian ‘disqualification’ criteria during Covid, but if your Aunt didn’t cruise for 9 years that might explain the terminology as she would have dropped down to Caribbean?

Thanks. We know not to expect anything on Iona (7 days) but we have three 14 night cruises booked, two on Ventura and one on Britannia and these will be our first cruises since reaching the dizzy heights of Caribbean tier, so we are keen to experience the few extra perks that come with it 😂

Have lunches for Caribbean tier and above returned for cruises of 14 nights of more?

Will do! Am I right that’s in Keel & Cow and not the Beach House? Was thinking of going there for lunch rather dinner, probably on a port day when the ship is quieter (given that it’s in the atrium). Might be too much for lunch!

Never stayed in one but have been on Aurora 8 times and had a nose in them when passing. I made a note that if ever we desperately wanted to go on an Aurora cruise and couldn’t get an accessible balcony cabin, to choose one on the starboard side. The reason being that the entrance / exit to the MDR is on the port side and, as a result, that corridor is extremely busy. I’d swap to a starboard side one if you can, but if you can’t I don’t think it’s a show stopper.

I would assume from those times that 1130 is for Suites and Baltic customers and 1200 for Caribbean tier? Is that correct? Seems odd that Caribbean tier passengers are being given times as late as 1330, although I recall that in the 10 years or so before Covid (and I’m not exaggerating here) the boarding details always gave Caribbean customers the normal boarding time for their deck with a comment saying that those with priority boarding could arrive earlier and P&O were working on a fix to correct the boarding times 🙄

That’s a positive development. I hope that’s in place when we go on Iona in August.

From memory, the ship docks a considerable distance from the centre - far too far to walk and it’s along very busy dual carriageway?

I have been using the cruise Personaliser a lot over the past few days as we now have a number of cruise bookings and I’ve been updating our passport details, emergency contacts and insurance on all of them. I’ve managed to do it all, but did have a couple of odd issues. One is that new bookings seem to be pre-populated with my out of date passport number which if I wasn’t diligent I might have missed. Secondly, on one booking the login page steadfastly refuses to allow a login using my wife’s details, even though she is on the booking and all details are correct. Weird.

Excellent advice from Izzywiz. I agree with all of it, but accessible cabins should really only be booked by those who are physically unable to cope in a standard cabin, or are forced to book one due to having a scooter. Even when my wife was a part time wheelchair user we booked regular cabins, as we didn’t wish to deprive those who couldn’t cope without one. Now that she is a full time wheelchair user we are unable to cruise unless we can get an accessible cabin, and they are difficult to secure.

I eat steak very rarely, but the ones in the Beach House (on lava stone) are usually fabulous.