Selbourne

All of this takes me back to last year when I booked the Aurora 65 nighter. My excitement at having secured a balcony cabin at well under half the Select price turned to near panic within 24 hours when it looked as though we couldn’t get insured unless we paid an astronomical premium. It put such a downer on things that I would have cancelled the booking had I been able to. A few days later, thanks to advice on this forum, I took out a policy through Nationwide and U.K. Insurance were absolutely brilliant, from the very reasonable add on quotes right through to the missed port claims that we submitted upon our return. Whilst we don’t have any cruises booked beyond the end of the current policy year, I intend to enquire as to the add on costs with Arriva, as it will help inform whether or not we are prepared to grab any late bargains again in the future. Next years 65 nighter doesn’t appeal as much as the one we did this year, but if we can get a similar price and reasonably priced insurance you never know 😂

Whilst not wishing you to divulge personal information, do you mind me asking if there will be age or health related issues that are contributing to this high quote? Also, is the £900 purely for the extension, or is that the additional premium for all weighted factors over the next 12 months including the extension? Prior to taking out Nationwide’s Flex Plus travel insurance we were insured directly with Aviva. When we booked a 65 night cruise Aviva wouldn’t even quote us for a cruise of that length, so they clearly don’t like insuring very long holidays. With any insurance quote I use a comparison website, but having had no luck with Aviva I asked the meerkats for help and was horrified to find that we couldn’t even get a quote from many providers and others were eye watering, hence why we were so relived to discover Nationwide as U.K. Insurance, as they were brilliant. Hopefully @Megabear2 might respond as she had done a lot of research on insurance. My only other suggestion, after the usual comparison sites, is to try Direct Line. They are linked with U.K. Insurance in some way and they never appear on price comparison websites.

We use both CPS and P4C. As has been said, CPS are usually cheaper on short cruises and P4C cheaper on longer ones, although we got parking with CPS for our 65 nighter earlier this year for just £160. We almost always book Select, but it’s worth noting that sometimes it can be worth declining the CPS parking (which isn’t ‘free’ as you are turning down additional OBC in order to get it) and book with another provider (P4C in our case). As has been said, the net gain can sometimes be quite considerable. For us, the issue is less about cost and more about speed and convenience. When CPS works well it is brilliant. Whilst we have never had any issues or delays with CPS at the end of a cruise, we have unfortunately had 3 or 4 instances with embarkation when we have been held in holding lanes for half an hour or more. Had we used P4C on those occasions we would have avoided all of that and been on the ship half an hour earlier. On our next cruise (Cunard) we are booked with CPS because we have a lot of OBC and don’t want any more as we will struggle to spend it, but after our contrasting experiences with our last 2 cruises (one with CPS and one with P4C) I would much rather be using P4C.

I corrected that in a subsequent post, as I found a copy of our completed ‘On Board Needs Questionnaire’ (admittedly for Cunard, but I think that they are the same) and noticed that there was a tick box for whether you needed an evacuation chair, which I had ticked. I suspect that the problems occur when passengers feel that they don’t need assistance when completing the form, but P&O subsequently do. As others have said, it really is essential to get clarity on this from P&O directly, as this is an immensely complicated area and none of us are experts on it. It’s a shame that you are being deterred from booking with P&O because of this issue, but I can’t say that I blame you. People want to look forward to a holiday, not be worried about it, and there’s a lot of confusion about this.

Not at all. It’s pretty much a standard marketing ploy used in many industries.

Yes, cancellations can happen at any time, especially around balance due dates, and upgrade schemes certainly throw up availability, but we are talking about a deliberate ploy that cruise lines, hotels and airlines all use, which is to deliberately show limited availability in order to panic people into booking when, in fact, there is loads more availability. As cabins sell, more will magically appear!

No, I’m not referring to dynamic pricing. Cruise lines do that as well! I was referring to showing limited or no availability in certain grades to encourage bookings when, in fact, there is plenty of other availability which is released later once those cabins are booked. Both cruise lines and hotels use both tactics.

P&O U.K. do the same. It looks like there is very little availability, or even sell outs in certain grades, only for a new batch to be released a few weeks later! I suspect that all cruise lines do this. Hotels do the same. In fact there’s an advert on TV at the moment that exposes this!

I am relieved to hear that you finally got this sorted, in spite of the initial difficulties that you had with your TA and P&O. Thank you for coming back to let us know the final outcome. It’s always frustrating when somebody asks for advice, many of us try to help and then we never hear from them again, so it is always appreciated when we are told how it ended up! Hopefully you can all now look forward to your cruise and begin to move on from your loss.

We’ve done that a few times, but found that they bring all courses at the same time which is far from ideal.

Just to expand on my post, I think that the best corner wrap suites on Britannia are the ones on B, C and E deck. A deck suites are overlooked from the terrace bar and public decks above. As mentioned, G is above the Live Lounge. F and D deck corner wrap suites have a different layout and we had multiple problems with our F deck corner suite - noise from the Live Lounge (even though we were 2 decks above it), plumbing noise from other cabins (bizarrely the service cupboard for the plumbing for several aft cabins was inside our suite), vibration (multiple rattles) and soot on the balcony. My first choice would be B or C deck.

As others have said, the corner wrap suites are nice, but avoid G deck (right above Live Lounge) and F deck (still gets noise and other issues).

You are lucky if you’ve never been caught up in a holding queue for CPS. There’s no pattern to it though. Sometimes we have pulled up and been able to check the car in almost immediately. This even happened on Iona in August school holidays, which amazed us. On several other cruises, even on much smaller ships, we have been held in slow moving holding queues - or static holding queues. Two that stick in my mind were Britannia and Aurora. The latter (Jan this year) was the worst. We were marshalled in to one of three holding lanes and sat there for half an hour whilst all the cars that arrived after us were ushered through first, as the holding lanes were full. The reason for the long delays became apparent when we were eventually called forward. There were only a handful of staff checking in vehicles. As a result of this experience, I cancelled CPS for our recent Cunard cruise and used Parking4Cruises. When we pulled up at Mayflower terminal there were the same 3 holding lanes full of cars waiting to be checked in by CPS, so it gave me some satisfaction to drop off my wife and suitcases, drive over to the short stay car park where P4C checked in my car immediately and I was back with my wife within 10 minutes whilst all the cars in the CPS holding lanes were still sat there. I’ve never experienced a queue to collect the keys after a cruise with CPS, but I’ve had enough frustrating delays at the start of the cruise to make me only use them now if they are significantly cheaper than P4C. If I can trade in the ‘free’ parking for OBC that is more than the cost of parking with P4C then I consider that a win.

From the tone of the original post (including the 🤣 emoji), it suggested to me that, like most (but clearly not all) of us on this forum, the OP has a sense of humour. Difficult to have an entirely serious conversation about pubes 😂

That’s got them by the short and curlies Jean 🤔😂

I think that there should be a prize for the first person who has used the word ‘pubes’ in a cruise review. Could this be the winner or have I missed a previous one? 🤣

I’m always a bit sceptical about cabin availability. I can’t help but feel that sometimes cabins are released in batches to make it look as though there is limited availability, in order to encourage bookings. Miraculously, once those cabins are sold another load appear. And so it goes on. It’s a classic marketing tactic. If this cruise has sold that well I’d expect prices be something daft like double the launch prices, as we know can happen with very popular cruise this far out from a cruise. I think you make a good point about the new to cruising market. Many of us started our cruising in inside (or, in our case, outside) cabins and as the years went on traded up to a balcony and then never moved back. With P&O targeting the ‘new to cruising market’ with their newest ships, inside cabins are likely to be in high demand. That being said, with cruises of 35 nights and more it’s usually just those of us fortunate enough to be retired who can afford the time (and indeed the cost) of these longer cruises!

Whilst I am under no illusion that launch prices are no longer the cheapest that you will ever get a cruise for, I’m surprised that the cruise is cheaper 8 months out, which is usually an expensive time to book. I’d expect it to be a lot higher than launch prices now, with big price drops kicking in after balance due date, although I guess that longer cruises are more challenging to fill with last minute bookings. The price per night still seems quite steep for Iona though. I wonder if the fact that there are only 7 Caribbean ports has resulted in less early take ups than they might have expected?

The accessible public toilets on Queen Anne had the same (complicated) touch mechanisms as on Iona, but none of them had drop down grab rails. There didn’t appear to be a drop down grab rail anywhere on the ship. The rather bizarre design was to have a fixed wall mounted rail around virtually the entire room, including areas where it would never be used. This was the same as the bathroom in our accessible cabin which, as I’ve mentioned, my wife struggled with. As for table spacing, Britannia Club was excellent. There was no banquette seating, but some tables for 2 along walls were spaced around 2ft apart. We were offered one of those but declined it. We had a table for 2 that was between a table of 4 and a table of 2. I’d say that we were a good 5-6ft apart from them. Oddly, the table spacing in Britannia Club was better than the (much more expensive) Grills restaurants, which even had banquettes (which Club didn’t). Some grills passengers commented that Club seems to be the sweet spot in this respect. The restaurant manager has made a note that we’d like the same table for our November cruise (we debated cancelling it based on the accessibility challenges, but the November cruise is much cheaper (cheaper than the normal balcony prices on Aurora) so, unless my wife takes a turn for the worse, we are going to go, but take some aids with us to assist me lifting her if she gets stuck again.

They take their responsibilities extremely seriously and I have no doubt that my wife would be taken care of, which is just as well as I’d be long gone 😂

As others have said, the limiting factor will more likely be the number of crew allocated to assist such passengers and that probably limits the number of chairs. My concern is that if these chairs (and associated crew) are allocated to those who, in reality, don’t need them (but have been allocated them under this new ‘belt and braces’ approach) then those who genuinely need assistance (such as our better halves) may not be able to make bookings. As often is the case, it’s the unintended consequences that cause the most issues.

As the husband of someone who is very seriously disabled and would genuinely require assistance if the lifts were out of use, I despair at how silly this is all getting. Whether it’s all the political correctness these days, where anything and everything is classed as a ‘disability’ (nobody has a ‘condition’ any more), or just incompetence, I just don’t know but, either way, it’s very off putting.

😱 Both Jam Shed Shiraz and Money Spider were Glasshouse only, not MDR, but if they’ve both gone that’s a real shame. That just leaves me with Peller Ice Cuvée and Silk & Spice. Please - nobody tell me that they have gone as well or I shall need counselling 😂

😭

If you personally don’t find Cunard to be any better than P&O then I’d stick with the latter, rather than try to make Cunard fit your requirements. If you like Iona / Arvia you won’t be able to make Cunard prices come even close. Iona wasn’t for us and we found Cunard to be a more premium product, so we feel that we can justify the price differential. We also find the P&O speciality restaurants to be OK for the odd night, but we wouldn’t want to use them every night of a cruise. We prefer the MDR for the majority of our meals, an area where we felt that Cunard was better. As for the price premium of Britannia Club it varies enormously. I can’t remember the price differential when we booked, but from memory it was something like £2k more than Britannia, but many more thousands below Princess Grill. We booked on launch day, so probably paid over the odds (we didn’t know any different at the time, but we really wanted to try Club so we swallowed it). However, using Britannia Club was probably the highlight of the cruise for us, so it was money well spent. Not having the faff of virtual queues, pagers or physical queues, being able to just walk in whenever we fancied to our designated table, having a fairly good choice of a la’ carte items every day in addition to the full MDR menu (we used these often) and nice touches such as daily flambéed desserts, a nice cheese board etc All of these things made it a considerably enhanced experience over anything that we’ve had on P&O - including when we used to book suites with P&O. Our November Queen Anne cruise was booked well after launch and we only payed around £1k more than Britannia for Britannia Club. I think that’s around £35 pppn premium which, based on our recent experience, is a bargain. As for speciality restaurants, there were quite a few on Queen Anne but we didn’t use any of them. Frankly, we didn’t feel the need to, whereas we do when on P&O. Without doubt they are more expensive on Cunard, but I’d probably put money on them being better food wise. We have found the P&O speciality restaurants to be a bit patchy in recent years - including Epicurean which was always our favourite. As to whether booking Britannia and dining speciality every night would work out cheaper than booking Club I’d say it would depend on the cruise, but is possible. That approach wouldn’t work for us though as, just with P&O, we’d find the menus too restrictive and repetitive whereas we prefer the variety of the MDRs.