IB2

So with the opening of summer 2024-spring 2025 bookings, there's been the usual scrum for kennel places, and the current position appears to be: The 5 May eastbound crossing is already sold out upper and lower, with a waitlist for the upper kennels and the lower waitlist already full and hence closed. There are still upper kennels (for cats, or dogs weighing less than 26 lbs) on all other crossings. For lower kennels, the eastbound 23 May and 6 October crossings are sold out and the waitlist is already full and hence closed. The 16 June eastbound is already sold out with a long waitlist, as is the 6 July eastbound. The 28 July eastbound is sold out with a short waitlist, the 23 August eastbound is sold out with a reasonably long waitlist, the 15 September westbound is sold out with a short waitlist, as is the 25 October eastbound; the 3 December eastbound is sold out with no waitlist currently. For the remaining crossings there are, as of today, still between four and seven (out of twelve) lower kennels unsold.

Yes, they could certainly do it in six days, possibly five at maximum speed - the slower pace is a mixture of economy (the diesel generators are cheaper to run than the aviation fuel turbines that push the speed up to maximum), contingency (so that they always arrive on time, regardless of weather or medical diversions), and marketing - they do seem to believe that crossings of a round-week maximise their appeal and income. The old QE2 was originally scheduled to a five-day crossing, but dropped back to six days in the 1990s, I believe?

OK, fair enough, I checked the two crossings I booked yesterday myself online, and my first thought was, ‘wow’, the prices have gone up already…but it was simply that I’d been billed with the 5% early bird discount.

Are you sure that isn’t simply that the website advertised prices don’t include the 5% early bird discount?

Yes, I just checked mine as well, and mine for 2024 are actually cheaper than for 2022 - but in my case I don't take the flights. For this year's travel they took £200 off each of mine because I didn't take a flight - I now see that the prices are quoted ex-flight and you have to add the flights on - and they all cost a lot more than £200! Clearly the £200 refund being given in the past was a bad deal!

As a p.s. to my post above, I checked both my crossings online today to confirm the prices, and there is a KC cabin still available on both of them - despite my being told yesterday I was getting the last one! So I can only assume that some of yesterday's bookings didn't go through, or that people changed their mind and another cabin has become free?

What a mess. When I booked (for 2024!) yesterday, they said it is still policy that you can’t travel with covid symptoms, but didn’t say how this would be enforced. They also asked some question about conditions requiring oxygen, which I don’t remember before.

The popular cabins will go quickly and they are then left with the marketing task of filling up the ship and all the less popular ones. When the QM2 was being designed, the owner of Cunard was adamant that he wanted the ship to have half its cabins with balconies - which was a challenging goal leading the ship to be designed higher (requiring some clever work with the funnel to still be able to get under that New York bridge) and wider (which meant abandoning the original goal of being able to fit through the Panama Canal) than originally intended, the length already constrained by the turning circle in Southampton docks. But the Cunard boss surely knew his business in terms of getting a balance of cabin types that would sell!

Sadly the promenade to Bonchurch is recently closed because cracks and some big voids have been identified under the sea wall, which is going to take some years and many £millions to repair, to protect the land behind and homes up the hill. The cruise lines didn’t receive any support during the pandemic - having all been careful to place themselves outside of UK, US or EU jurisdiction previously - and have taken on huge debts to cover their immense losses since 2020. Now, interest rates are rising, pushing up the cost of that debt. And they are still constrained operationally by the residual covid restrictions and the still present risk of further outbreaks. Their financial situation is perilous (at least one is already bankrupt) and it is going to be touch and go whether they can recover to profitability. So we aren’t likely to see bargain prices or a better offering for the same money, any time soon.

Yes, that’s the thing you will notice the most. The time adjustment for the voyage is five hours but spread over seven days, so each day - in crude terms - the sunrise and sunset times are changing by 40-45 minutes (varying in summer and winter owing to the change in latitude) because of the ship’s travel, which means a ‘clock time’ change of about 15-20 minutes on days when the clock has been adjusted during the 24 hours prior, but a significant jump of 40-45 minutes in the opposite direction on the couple of days when there’s been no change.

And there will be an element of segmentation involved - they will want to know what their existing customer base enjoys, but if it’s formality, they just need to be a bit more formal than the competition to retain most of that market. They will be particularly interested in what attracted (or otherwise) their new customers to the line.

They can’t afford to turn anyone away nowadays - they just advertised the different dates to the respective audiences, but if you went into the website you could book whether you were logged in or simply checked through as a guest.

Got through on the phone after forty minutes waiting, during the first hour bookings were open. Took the last available KC on the westbound TA and left just one for some later customer on the eastbound. We have to wait until Thursday or Friday to find out whether our kennel requests can be met or whether the waitlist beckons....

Today I phoned up just seconds after bookings opened for summer 2024 and got put through forty minutes later; in that first forty minutes of the booking period, all but one of the KC third deck single cabins on my westbound TA had gone (so I took the last one), and there were just two remaining on the eastbound. So the answer to your Q is that they go in the first hour! That said, there has been one KC available on the April 2024 crossing (which has been bookable since last year) for some weeks, so just occasionally it is possible to get lucky.

I expect that the reality is that the QM2 cabins became singles because they were added during the refit and 'work', in terms of design, only because the long side of the room is parallel to the corridor, unlike the normal arrangement where the rooms run across the ship. With just a single bed positioned along the room (and hence ship) there is a reasonable amount of floor space for one person. But they'd struggle to get the usual large double bed in there which would leave a cramped cabin for two. So making them singles was a design solution to use those under-utilised ships' spaces to add to its capacity. You pay extra for them, so you don't save compared to single-occupying a normal cabin, but then of course you are getting a decent cabin for your money. But it wouldn't have made financial sense to design along-ship single cabins with giant windows from scratch, so we're lucky to have them now!

Out of interest, what's the reason for the couple of eight-day long TAs?

I have been told the details will be posted on the website within days now, and will be bookable from a date in very early December

The early part of 2025 is, I think, expected very shortly?

The internet is a lot better now than it used to be before the pandemic! How Americans manage without an electric kettle, I do not know! Fortunately Cunard supplies one in every room. A lecture by Stephen Payne would have been a real treat.

I believe that summer/autumn 2024 will be released next month, December 2022.

Whilst the OP is right that some topics are best avoided, at least until the diners get to know each other a bit, it’s the approach to the conversation that matters more than the subject matter. In extremis you can easily ask to be moved to another table, but I have found that the type of person or couple willing to be seated on a larger table with others are generally open to good conversation and most Cunarders have more sense than to try and force their views onto others. The only time I ever asked to move was when I found myself on a table of eight with what turned out to be a regular cruisecritic.co.uk reviewer. Every time any dish arrived at the table, this person got out their phone and photographed it from every angle, and they sat with a notebook on their knee and spent the whole meal scribbling notes under the tablecloth, not participating in conversation at all and responding to the few attempts to involve them in the table discussion with curt yes or no answers, before returning to their scribbling. Ironically after my crossing I chanced upon this person’s write up of the cruise on this site, and it was actually a really good read. But in real life this person was dreadful company - of the original table of eight, five of us moved away, leaving just the cruisecritic person and a very patient couple on the original table. I was amused to see that at the end of the write up the reviewer mentioned that it was disappointing that most of the table didn’t turn up to dinner later in the week, without any awareness as to what had actually happened!

There is plenty about this on other threads already.

I felt that at the beginning of the crossing, and I did have one unsatisfactory evening with four of us on a table of eight, only one of whom spoke any English. The other nights, in the end it worked out well and I found myself on tables with interesting conversations. I didn’t have the camaraderie you get of being in the same group all week, but I did have that first night experience of meeting a new bunch of people multiple nights over. What I disliked the most was the uncertainty - dressing for dinner and having to wait in line to be allocated a table, with no idea who I’d be sitting with, imagining the risk of a half empty table, people who didn’t speak English, or arriving as the gooseberry in an established group. For this reason alone I preferred the old system. Although if Cunard could guarantee that solos and sociable couples would be mixed together on full tables or eight or ten, and pay some attention to people’s languages, it would also make for an enjoyable experience, meeting new people each night. But in reality it wasn’t that organised - a short line of impatient people being allocated almost randomly to tables, with anyone wanting to argue about it knowing they were holding up the line. And the wine waiters having to scurry here and there looking for diners’ bottles from the night before.

Yes, it’s a mess currently. See my comments on the earlier thread.

Bizarre, since I spent fourteen nights in those cabins and never heard anyone coming down the corridor at all. With the steps up and down and the fire doors to pull open, it’s not exactly a short cut. The cabins are magnificent and the two extra-large porthole windows (which magically start cleaning themselves early each morning) are wonderful. If any reader is thinking of nabbing one before they sell out, go for it! Kudos too for Eric who usually looks after those cabins - a quiet but efficient member of Cunard’s staff who will sort out any issues that you have.