Selbourne

Excellent. Just as we like it. No late night noise 😂 I went for a late night wander around all the outdoor areas on QM2 and I was the sole person on the top open decks and forward looking viewpoints. Quite a nice, if surreal, experience actually!

Totally confusing. Multiple different prices referred to in this thread and the deluxe package still seems to have a lot of restrictions (the words ‘certain x’ wouldn’t fill me with confidence)

All are welcome 😉

Don’t panic. I’m sure that you’ll have a fabulous time. Most of the current problems are on Arvia. Also, not having cruised before you won’t be making comparisons as to how it used to be!

Very good point. I have a feeling that British Heart Foundation (and possibly some other charities) may have a similar scheme. The big advantage of Mobility at Sea is that you don’t need to transport the wheelchair (or whatever) in the car, along with your luggage.

We used Mobility at Sea a number of times whilst my wife was still a part time wheelchair user. Very expensive but useful. We were able to collect the wheelchair from just inside the terminal building, but that may have changed now. As others have said, P&O will provide a wheelchair and a pusher just to get you on and off the ship, but if you need one (or any other mobility aid) for use during the cruise then they will not provide them and you must take your own, or hire one at your own cost. https://www.mobilityatsea.co.uk

We are doing our first post Covid P&O cruise in July on Britannia. We have 3 further P&O cruises booked over the next 10 months - one on Iona and two on Ventura. Based on all the reviews over the past year, we are anticipating that there may be some issues that are not to our liking, but we have reduced the maximum price that we are prepared to pay in order to reflect this. With four cruises across 3 different ships, we will be able to form our own opinions on the ‘new P&O’. Hopefully we will be pleasantly surprised. By contrast, we recently enjoyed our first Cunard cruise and didn’t experience a single one of the issues that are frequently reported on P&O ships these days. As a result, we now have two 2024 cruises booked with them. We are also keen to try Saga. I am hoping that we will still find the P&O experience to be satisfactory for ‘filler’ holidays at the right price, which can be blended with Cunard and possibly Saga cruises for more special holidays. If, however, we come to the reluctant decision after 27 years with P&O that they are no longer for us, I would stop contributing to this forum. Maybe it’s just me, but if you’ve decided that you will never use a company again it seems pretty pointless to keep banging on about it and telling everyone else that they have made a bad decision 🤔

Cunard don’t require a jacket every evening. I took one as we were in grills and, to be fair, most wore them, but it is no longer a requirement, other than formal nights.

Well I’ve had a reply this morning to my request last week to add shareholder OBC to our November 2024 Cunard cruise, headed “Cunard Shareholders Benefit Denied”. It reads; Thank you for your application for Shareholder Benefits. We are unable to process your shareholder benefit application at this time as we are outside 90 days prior to departure. We are only able to accept and apply shareholder applications between 21-90 days prior to departure and the balance is paid in full. I am sorry for any inconvenience caused. We look forward to hearing from you soon. They are, of course, quite correct in what they say. I just find it amusing that over the past few weeks they have added shareholder OBC to four other cruises (P&O and Cunard) that are all well outside the 90 days as well! I’ll just have to remember to contact them again in August 2024!

Awful that you should have to put up with that. I’m afraid that somebody smoking or vaping on a balcony would bring out the absolute worst in me. If the deck managers didn’t get it resolved I’d be asking why the offending passengers haven’t been offloaded from the ship. If they offered me their house wine rather than deal with the issue, I would use it to extinguish the offending cigarette (given that anti freeze is of no use when I don’t have the car with me) 😂

Excellent points. Other cruise lines can manage far better embarkation and disembarkation procedures, yet P&O steadfastly stick with what they have always done and subject people to horrendous queues. It’s all very well people pontificating that passengers shouldn’t turn up until their allocated time, but that’s nigh on impossible with long travel distances, unpredictable traffic and the understandable reluctance to leave cars unattended with suitcases, baggage and valuables in them. We were hugely impressed with the Cunard disembarkation process, where you have full use of your cabin until your allocated disembarkation time. You go to breakfast (without hand luggage), go back to your cabin to refresh and just relax there until your designated time. No announcements, no herding in overcrowded public rooms, you just wander down from your cabin when your time comes and disembark. They also give you colour coded and numbered disembarkation luggage labels and off load luggage in that order. This also means that you have a much smaller ‘zone’ to search for your luggage. Found our cases in seconds. Those of us blessed with priority embarkation can easily lose sight of how frustrating all of this can be. When we are on Iona in August we have priority but our daughters and partners don’t. I can imagine that they will have some stories to tell by the time that they join us. It will be the first cruise for both of their partners and I suspect that they might wonder what they’ve let themselves in for 😂

See posts #114 & 115 for a solution that would work for both customers (the most important) and P&O.

If you want to make any pre cruise bookings (excursions or speciality dining), ensure that you log on to your Cruise Personaliser (not your husband) and make the bookings (for 2), then you should get your 10% discount on both.

What an excellent idea. On the deck plans there’s a long list of issues that are flagged for balconies, such as steel fronted, shaded, overlooked, partially obstructed, obstructed etc and yet P&O still manage to sell these cabins. If there are known issues with noise then, as you say, some will still book them (at a lower fare) because it won’t bother them. Those of us who have done many cruises (and often learned the hard way) know to avoid being over or under public areas, especially those where amplified music is played. However, we can still get caught out (we thought that two decks above the Live Lounge would be fine - and we were wrong). Those who are new to cruising (P&Os new target audience) won’t know any of these things and may be put off cruising if their first experience is a bad one. It’s also deeply unfair for the ships crew to be faced with multiple unhappy passengers on every cruise.

Many of the minimum bids come close to the price difference at booking anyway, so no huge saving. Upgrades are charged at the rate applicable when you booked, not the current rate, so it might be worth a call if you would ideally like a bigger cabin. Just be careful if on Iona or Arvia you don’t end up on the dreaded deck 8!

Well said. Admittedly the Duck a’lorange was our least favourite a’ la carte dish in Princess Grill 2 weeks back, but we’d be happy to slum it with the chateaubriand, rack of lamb (my favourite) and the crepes Suzette any time soon. Made me smile each time the restaurant managers checked that they weren’t under a sprinkler before chucking in all the alcohol to flambé them. The caviar on the crab and langoustine starter was also nice, as we don’t tend to eat it at home. I’m cooking a pasta bake at present 😉

Things can, and do, go wrong with all types of holidays. On one of our trips to Florida when the kids were young we were still on the tarmac at Gatwick at the time that we should have been landing in Orlando. As you know, that’s a 9 hour flight. Never flew with BA again after that debacle.

Any Queens? MB is a loyal Cunard customer. If you don’t ask……

I know from first hand experience that these are read and actioned. We were on a cruise once and had a dreadful cruise director (or entertainment manager, whatever they call them now). He did everything we hate - “are you all having a good time?”, “shake hands with the stranger next to you” etc etc. Absolutely cringeworthy and put me in mind of a holiday camp or old folks home, and I said so on the first impressions form. We returned to our cabin the following day to a voicemail from the cruise director saying that he would take my comments on board. 🤣

Like everyone, I’m keeping everything crossed that MB gets a resolution (and I have a hunch that she will, especially if P&O are alerted to this thread) but you have to feel for the passengers in the other 99 cabins that have similar problems. They can’t all be resolved. Some will complain, some won’t but may decide that cruising isn’t quite what they had expected. You only get one chance to make a first impression. I know that MB didn’t book a Saver, but this experience is a sobering warning to those that do, as you get what is left and savvy Select passengers will avoid these cabins like the plague, so your chances of getting a bad one are obviously higher. As they say with property - location, location, location!

There is something odd going on at present. Some cruises are off sale and nobody really knows why. We went on a wait list for the current Aurora cruise and my understanding was that we could have been contacted up until 7 days before the cruise. As it happened, we were relieved not to be successful, as we managed to get on the bargain Coronation Cruise on QM2 in grills for less per night than we would have paid for a standard balcony on Aurora. Fate worked in our favour, for once!

We had 3 cancelled. Could well have had the offer and completely missed it, as we weren’t remotely interested in cruising when it restarted with all the on board restrictions and fear of cabin confinement etc. Maybe they knew I was a lost cause at that stage, so they didn’t bother to send it to me 😂

Interesting. Is that 2 weeks prior to the cruise? Seems to be all over the place!

Thats 4 cabins back from the aft though, so some way back from any speakers (which can make a big difference), but is encouraging for SarahHben as it is also on the starboard side (we were port), which may add weight to my theory that only one side may get the worst noise?

Just to provide some balance to my comments about noise issues, one thing that has always hugely impressed me about P&O is their maintenance teams and their willingness to resolve issues quickly. I know that others have had different experiences, but I must speak as I find, and any issues we have reported have usually been dealt with promptly and efficiently. The best, and most impressive, example I can give was when we had a forward suite on Britannia. No noise whatsoever from neighbours, but when in bed you could hear a constant noise that I would liken to the noise you hear in harbours when the sail cables (wrong term, I know) are banging against the mast in wind. We’d had a blocked sink which the maintenance team fixed within an hour of reporting it and when the deck manager came to check if it was OK I mentioned the noise to him. When we went out on to our balcony we realised what the cause was, and it was a cable for a light that was suspended underneath the overhang of the bridge. I said to my wife that we’d be stuck with the noise for the fortnight as there was no way they could fix that during a cruise. First stop was Gibraltar, and when we returned to the ship I looked up and to my amazement saw a technician hanging from a harness under the bridge. When we returned to the cabin I had a look and he had covered the cable in a cowling that stopped it banging. No more noise for the next 10 days of the cruise. Now that’s impressive! Again, to show balance, on Cunard the other week we had a problem with the door lock and it was sometimes taking 20 or 30 ‘swipes’ to gain access to the cabin (not ideal when you need the loo). Reported it twice and nothing was done about it.