IB2

Which makes one wonder what exactly is the point of fiddling around with the App booking a time.

Having done two TAs this year in a third deck cabin, and having been worried beforehand by your post about the noise, I just wanted to come back and share that there is no problem with noise in the corridor outside the third deck cabin, at all. Hardly anyone goes down there, day or night. The cabins are delightful, and with the two large round windows it feels more like a hotel room than a ship’s cabin. The location is good, with easy access to lifts C and D depending on which way you turn out of your room. I could occasionally hear noise from the cabins next door at night, but this isn’t unknown wherever on the ship you sleep.

Oct 6-13 is the wrong way round? By the way, when do we expect summer/autumn ‘24 crossings to go on sale?

Personally I find people expecting the whole restaurant to celebrate their birthday as mildly annoying. It happened twice on Britannia on my recent crossings. Celebrate on your own table, by all means, but why should the staff have to make a lot of noise and effectively ask the whole restaurant to pause their conversations while a load of them are made to sing to a single guest? It’s not as if having a regular birthday (until you get to 100) is a special achievement, after all - I think you’ll find that everyone has them….

My feeling from the QM2 is that the internet worked pretty well in the public areas, but what passengers thought about it varied considerably depending on how good it worked in their cabin.

QM2 yesterday morning, approaching the Channel

On the TA just completed, a batch of guests had a horror story to tell about their arrival at JFK, the failure of the Cunard transfer and their almost missing the ship. I won’t post any more details since it was a tale told over dinner and I am not sure I would remember the details correctly. But staying in NYC or Southampton (or Hamburg) the night before the crossing starts seems much more sensible than risking flying in on the morning of sailing.

As above the current system is fixed for early sitting and book-your-time-every-day and queue up each night to be allocated a table, for late sitting. If the arrangements are due to change in November then this will only concern people due to travel on the next few cruises. I don’t like the new system - as above - although I have had two good tables, one OK one, and only one disaster, and am meeting a wider range of people, so there is an upside, even if I strongly prefer the old fixed table approach.

I'm on it now, and its way better than it was in 2019. I have the basic package (no streaming) and it works fine for email and browsing, just occasionally a little slow (only a second or two or three) on loading pages at busy times (lunch and before and after dinner) but otherwise fine. It works well in my 3rd floor cabin but other passengers have said their cabin service is slow and it only works well in public rooms. I guess it depends on where your cabin is. Another passenger has the enhanced streaming service and he says it OK but not great, with a fair bit of buffering.

Well, there's no fixed dining in the late Britannia sitting on my current TA

It’s clear that they (and surely all cruise lines) have had a significant turnover of staff since the pandemic, having sent them back to far flung parts of the world and then assembling crews at short notice when cruising resumed. And the additional precautions due to covid have created extra work for staff in a whole host of ways - having to post extra people standing about with hand sanitiser, having to serve you everything in the buffet, extra cleaning, etc. On my August crossing the standard of service didn’t seem as good as I remember from 2019, and I’d put most of this down to new staff. On my current crossing things seem to have settled down, except in the dining room where the changes to the seating/booking arrangements are creating a bit of confusion.

Yes, but fewer people drink at lunchtime and the Britannia is pretty empty as most people go to KC. The staff in the evening so far are coping with ferrying all the wine bottles around the place, but it is clearly creating more work for them, and if you need to order a fresh bottle for your meal, getting hold of the wine guy is more difficult as he (or she) could easily be out of sight.

One consolation by way of mitigation is that at the end of this crossing I will have had so many waiters and wine guys that I won’t feel under any obligation to tip any of them! The other side of this coin, of course, is that you don’t get the chance to build a relationship with the staff, either, which many diners enjoy. I remember on my very first crossing we had an amazing waiter with a great sense of humour, and we looked forward to dinner with him each night and I am sure he got good tips. On my second crossing I had a wine guy with good knowledge who got to know my tastes and we enjoyed our nightly discussion about wines. Not having that opportunity is another downside of the new system. It’s also apparent that with every table at a different stage of their meal, the staff seem a lot more hurried and there isn’t the same opportunity to interact with the staff that you used to get when every table had settled into their first courses.

Advertising it as a five course dinner is a bit of a nonsense - unless they are counting coffee and canapés as courses! Yes, you can have a five course meal, but if everyone did so the whole place would grind to a halt.

There is normally a short queue to get in each night, and having to hang around, if not for very long, every time is a little frustrating, compared to the old system where after night one you knew where to go. People get dealt with very quickly but this means the decisions as to where you get sent are essentially random, and anyone who wants to debate where they’d like to go has to do so with a queue of hungry people waiting behind them. I complained last night about the new system to the guy allocating the tables, and his response was basically that he knew lots of people didn’t like it, but what could he do? As a solo traveller the first night I landed on a decent table of six which I would happily have kept for the cruise. On the second night I arrived five minutes earlier than the night before, and asked for the same table, but was told this was full and was sat on a table of eight with entirely new people, but again a decent group. Because I was sitting a long way from the previous night, they had to go hunting for my bottle of wine and it was obvious that the wine guys were being kept busy carrying bottles about here and there to follow around guests’ new seating positions. Last night I turned up and asked for either of the previous tables, but again these weren’t available and I was sat on my own on a table of eight; after ten minutes or so three more people turned up, two of whom spoke no English. The other four seats stayed empty. Really it’s a mess for those who enjoyed being part of a group for the whole crossing, and makes dinner for solo travellers and sociable couples a complete lottery, where you dress up and set off for dinner with no idea who or how many people you might be sitting with. It’s a real shame. The other observation is that late sitting people are eating earlier - hardly anyone arrives after 8.15pm. Whether this will change when early sitting people get the same system in November, I don’t know - one problem might be that the requirement to pre-book your eating time each night means that they can’t accommodate everyone from the off, and some have to eat a little later than normal start of first sitting? And if they allow a large group to book at say 7pm, they are effectively knocking out that table from both sittings, which when the ship is at 100% rather than 80% capacity could easily be a problem.

I boarded in Brooklyn on Friday and didn’t need to provide any proof. One of the medical screening questions was ‘are you vaccinated for covid?’ And the answer ‘yes’ was sufficient.

Yes. And under the new open seating arrangement, if you’ve ended up at the different end of Britannia from the night before, they will go off hunting for last nights bottle of wine and if you are lucky it might arrive before your food.

No, you can order what you want. Just be considerate to your tablemates - on my August TA we had a guy who ordered appetiser, soup, salad and main course, while the other six of us ordered the normal starter plus main. He got brought his three starters one at a time before everyone's main courses arrived together, and it was three days before he noticed that everyone else was sitting with nothing to eat while he worked through all his starters.

They will just go through it all when you board, like they do for people who don't bother to supply passport details or a photo online. It holds up the checking in process but if it's only a few people, they can manage.

Yes, on the current TA early sitting is allocated as before but for late sitting for the first night you get given a time but not a table, and have to queue up to be placed. For later nights you have to book a time. If you're in a group, or a couple wanting to dine alone, I'm sure this is more flexible, but if you're a solo or couple wanting the camaraderie than can develop if you land on a good larger table and meet the same people each night, it's a disappointment.

Travel in the kennels.

Undoubtedly good advice, noting that on Sundays (the usual day that QM2 is in) those ferries run only hourly

Well, the crossing I left yesterday had about 2,050 passengers on board, of whom just 260 were returning on the eastbound. Of those, some will be those wanting to stay on or near the ship, and others will be those making their own arrangements in NY for the day. So the numbers taking Cunard's tour will be small, and I am not convinced more passengers would do a Transatlantic if the ship remained docked in NY for two or three days? So it would be dead time, whereas setting sail the same evening, Cunard is immediately earning from another 2,000+ passengers.

I'm a day off a Britannia cruise, and perfectly happy, although the change in table preferences post-covid to lots of smaller tables is rather sad, and pointless given that Cunard has set the two- and four-person tables so close that you're no safer than at a larger table. The food is reasonably good, as ever, as, mostly, is the service, although there do seem to be more inexperienced staff about, as I guess not all those Cunard sent home during the pandemic have come back.

In August boarding the QM2 in Southampton, no-one asked about the covid test - so in practice it is optional already.