davyjones

Booked M503 yesterday in PG.  The price has already gone up £300pp.

Although this URL is for France the advice is valid for all Schengen countries:

• https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/france/entry-requirements
• Check your passport is stamped if you enter or exit the Schengen area through France as a visitor. Border guards will use passport stamps to check you’re complying with the 90-day visa-free limit for short stays in the Schengen area. If relevant entry or exit stamps are not in your passport, border guards will presume that you have overstayed your visa-free limit.

So it would seem there is no central database of entry/exit and it will rely on what is in your passport.

DJ

On 1/26/2022 at 5:36 PM, exlondoner said:

Wow. Were you aboard?

Yes. My father got a job in America for a couple of years.  I was only six and all I remember are the table tennis tables, bread rolls being served at meal times and picking up passengers in Cherbourg and Cobh.

I hope some find these of interest.

DJ

161177016_DailyProgrammes.pdf Landing Arrangements.pdf 824017803_PassengerInformation.pdf 1120881228_TouristClassDeckPlan.pdf

A sober look at the number of vaccinations required in the UK versus the hoped for number per week and you are looking at June for half the population to be vaccinated once and since we need to be vaccinated twice add at least 12 weeks to that and then you are into autumn and the seasonal flu/covid time kicks in again.

q.v. Page 1 penultimate paragraph:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/wp-content/uploads/sites/52/2020/12/C0994-System-letter-COVID-19-vaccination-deployment-planning-30-December-2020.pdf

Meteorological Spring ends 31 May, astronomical Spring ends 21 June.

If I access the Cunard web site and select the option "When would you like to travel?" the first calendar year shown is 2022 - you need to use the back link to get 2021.  Are they trying to tell us something?

DJ

Cunard 2022 cruises up to December 2022 are now online (in the UK) with booking starting 17 Nov.

5 hours ago, Kynance said:

@Ray66 - thank you for posting the link to that interesting Costa article. Whilst I see the logic for everything Costa will be doing, cruising under those conditions would not appeal to me, so if Cunard were to follow suit, I doubt very much I would return to cruising until such times as life onboard could return to “normal”. I am glad, therefore, I took a refund for our cancelled QV cruise and not the FCC option.  
 

For me, the onboard experience is at least as important as the itinerary itself so I can’t see myself wanting to pay the same level of fare for something that I didn’t think was going to be as enjoyable. I think I might be doing UK self-catering holidays for a good while to come, once these resume. 

I concur.  I note that item 18 says no dancing so I assume Cunard will adopt a similar policy and the ballroom will be redundant in the evening.

It would have been useful to have one of the options to be that insurance was available.  At the moment all UK insurers won't cover anything to do with C-19 so I assume the majority will cruise with no insurance cover.

5 minutes ago, IB2 said:

By which you mean, health screening before booking, with passengers who already have medical conditions not allowed to travel, and enhanced medical facilities on board.

This helps but doesn't solve the problem of visiting ports and coming back onboard. If testing were done at each port of call one could be stranded with no insurance and significant costs.  Somehow the travel industry need to cover this eventuality with a reasonably priced insurance product.

If Covid-19 is still around at a low level but one cannot get travel insurance that covers it who is going to travel given the high cost of medical care on a cruise ship and abroad.  Cunard, and the wider travel industry, will need to address this issue.

16 hours ago, sogne said:

My card UK will pay refund of 7k 2 MY bank account if requested which it will be

 

If you are in the UK and have a positive credit card balance, of say £3000, and you buy something for £1000 then you are not covered by credit card legislation as the credit card company are not extending you any credit for the purchase.  When I had to cancel a holiday the credit card company phoned me up to advise me of this and asked what bank account I wanted the money sent to.

On other news a Sunday newspaper is alledging that in a few weeks/months time anyone returning from abroad will need to self-isolate for 14 days with checks and fines.  This would surely put the final nail in the foreign holiday trade's coffin.

DJ

The web site (as seen in the UK) has had a minor improvement.  Instead of 'Apologies...' about not being able to change the bed config or the dining table size these options are now working.  One's Loyalty Tier also appears that I think was not shown before in the new site.  Amongst the many things still missing is your cabin number.  I also note that although booked in Britannia Club the web site states Main Dining Room for dining.

I was checking daily from about 5 months to go and actually booked our excursions 136 days before our upcoming cruise is due to set sail.  By the time they send out emails reminding you to book an excursion the popular ones will be full.

Hopefully Cunard will stick the new ship out in the Far East / Pacific rim and bring back QE so we can have a proper Cunard cruise schedule out of the UK like ye-olde days.

DJ

And on the USA site V126 for Club Balcony without flights (as far as I can tell) but with taxes is $5229.60 so £4255.69 so it might be wise not to raise the issue of price/benefit differences too much with Cunard in case they decide to bring the UK in line.

DJ

As an example, looking at V126 on the German and UK sites for a Britannia Club cabin gives 3561EUR (£3167) v £2349.  The German fare does not include flights.  So I am quite happy for the Germans to have 'free' gratutities.

DJ

We use six 42mm neodymium magnets to hold a sodden but not dripping towel just below the ceiling air-con vent.  We do this just before going to bed and by the morning the towel is dry which says something about the dryness of the air-con and why we always used to get throat and nasal problems that are now a thing of the past.

The 42mm magnet has enough strength to go through the towel and hold it directly against the ceiling.

DJ

On Saturday there was an article in the Daily Telegraph (UK) about someone who wanted to cancel their 2021 world cruise due to sudden ill-health.  The gist of the complaint was that Cunard were refusing to allow them to cancel and said they had to pay for the full cruise regardless.  I thought that you could cancel and lose your deposit up to the date the balance was due or are there different rules for the world cruise?

DJ

An american discount cruise website has the late 2021 cruises on show.

DJ

Next time we are on QM2 in a sheltered balcony I will be bringing some chair raisers that sit under the feet and will make the chair several inches higher.  We also pack a couple of folding lightweight camping stools to use as footstools - handy for when sitting in or out.

DJ

The ventilation shafts to the funnel run through this section and I found it very noisy in the cabin we had on deck 8 and now make a point of not booking this section of the ship.

DJ.

Lucky the people building the web site don't build the ships...

I am now getting the new web site on my laptop.  A quick perusal shows some good and some bad.  The good is that you can see a list of available cabins and choose the one you want - the display is as per the deckplan - although on one cruise I looked at only a list of cabin numbers was shown with no deckplan image.  The bad so far is that at a glance you can't see pricing for all cabins in the selected category.  Overall a very poor effort by the web design team.

Over wi-fi at home on my Android phone I get the new web site that now renders correctly for a small screen device but when connecting via my laptop on the same wi-fi I still get the old site.

DJ