bluemarble

One of our former frequent contributors from the UK, capnpugwash, called it "Thanksgiving".

I'm easily convinced to add another port to our list. Since we've counted a few other ports like this with multiple terminals in different sections of the city, it would appear this also ought to qualify as multiple ports for the purposes of our game. For the sake of brevity, I'd suggest listing them as follows. Busan (Cruise Terminal), Korea Busan (Passenger Terminal), Korea

This one is Busan, South Korea. QE's port of call on April 23.

The Southampton VTS website has been updated to show QM2 scheduled to depart April 27 at a time TBA. It still shows her destination as New York which of course is not correct. But that updated departure date from April 24 to April 27 is an interesting development.

At this point I think I can count us as lucky ones in this whole situation. We were booked on the full 26-night round trip voyage New York-Southampton-Norway and back (April 30-May 26). But I booked the voyage as three separate segments (eastbound, Norway, westbound). So now, assuming QM2 will resume service on May 7th with the cruise to Norway, we still have two of the three segments we can salvage. I had booked our flights to/from New York using frequent flier miles which I was able to cancel and have my miles reinstated. We are now booked on a flight to London next week instead. Much as we would have loved to celebrate the King's coronation on board QM2, the opportunity we now have to join in some of the celebrating in the UK ought to be even more special. So, in the spirit of making lemonade from lemons, we are now looking forward to an abbreviated 19-night QM2 voyage starting from Southampton instead of New York. That said, I do feel for all those who have been deeply impacted by this situation and the massive disruptions to plans these cancelations have caused.

This doesn't provide much detail but I'll transcribe an excerpt from a video interview I found with Matt Gleaves, Cunard's VP, Commercial - North America and Australasia. One of the questions he was asked was about Cunard's plans for the King's coronation. Here is his response. "We've been linked to royalty for a number of years, so you know we'll make sure we celebrate [the King's coronation] really well. We'll keep some of the plans top secret for now, but there will be various different people on board who have experienced the Royal Family that will be talking to our guests. We'll obviously do some signature pieces with our dining and our beverage option on board the ships. So yeah we'll absolutely be marking the occasion and making a celebration." You've mentioned QV specifically, but I'll add that one of the Insights Guest Lecturers on QM2 will be the curator of the Guards Museum in London. He will be tailoring one of his talks to the King's coronation.

Since we've started a new page and it's been several pages since I last posted our ports lists, here are updated versions including the addition of Yatsushiro to the seen ports list. I think we're now up to 617 entries in our seen ports list. I've added a few more ports to the unseen list for ports recently visited on QE's itineraries. Where in the World 2023-04-22.txt Cunard ports not seen yet 2023-04-22.txt

Just a reminder we have relaxed the original rules quite a bit. Your photos don't actually have to show the ship any more. Any photo you may have taken ashore yesterday showing a feature of the city we might be able to figure out will do fine. Or a photo taken from the ship showing any of the port will do fine as well.

QM2 returns to Southampton this evening to complete her 2023 world voyage for those who started in Southampton. She's returning early with reports there is a technical issue with one of her engines which needs to be worked on while she's in port. As of this posting, she isn't scheduled to depart Southampton until the morning of Monday, April 24th. This is a capture from the Netley Cam stream on the Solent Ships YouTube Channel.

It's always good to see new names joining our game. Welcome to @alc13 and @Sue-B! Although we haven't officially identified your current "by request" photo yet @alc13, it's clear several of us have figured it out. I'd also like to make a request for a photo of the port you visited yesterday since that's a new Cunard port we haven't seen yet. There are going to be several other ports on your current itinerary we haven't seen yet, so it would be great if you could contribute photos of those ports as well when the time comes. Thanks so much for adding to our seen Cunard ports list!

Well, that certainly helps concentrate the search! I can stop looking at ports in Norway and the Hebrides and Orkneys now. There aren't many ports in Wales on our seen ports list. But even better, there is only one port in Wales on the current itineraries for Hurtigruten in general and Otto Sverdrup in particular. From there it took a bit of searching but I eventually found a match for the coastline in this photo at Fishguard, Wales.

I haven't figured out the location yet. I'll start by attempting to identify the ship. This looks like one of the Hurtigruten ships. The best match appears to be MS Otto Sverdrup, formerly known as MS Finnmarken until 2020.

Very good, @alc13! That means I didn't need to post this webcam image of your departure showing a VERY distant view of your ship which I've circled in red.

That sounds like what I might expect. Perhaps normal boarding times but with an extended all aboard time since she won't be leaving until the next morning. Do let us know if you hear anything further from Cunard.

The word on other social media is that QM2 is arriving Southampton early and departing late because "...there are technical stuff that needs to be done...". I know, that's not all that helpful, but that's what is being said elsewhere for whatever that might be worth.

I don't know if the boarding time has been delayed any. Have you been told that? QM2 is actually going to be arriving early into Southampton Saturday evening but not departing until Monday morning. We've been discussing QM2's altered schedule on this thread.

It will be interesting to see what effect if any QM2's delayed departure from Southampton until the morning of April 24th will have on her arrival in New York on April 30th. She certainly is capable of making up the time (about 16 hours) for an ontime arrival in New York if they let her. We are scheduled to board QM2 in New York on April 30th so will be keeping an eye on the situstion with particular interest.

Since the restart of operations, jackets are indeed no longer required for gentlemen on the Smart Attire evenings. I have some concerns about what may be happening to the Gala Evening dress code. As I mentioned in another thread, the "What to pack" page on the Cunard website for both the UK and Australia was recently changed to read as follows. "At least twice on each seven-night voyage we’ll host a Gala Evening, where we do ask that you observe an elevated dress code." Note the word "black-tie" in the previous wording has been changed to "elevated". And then there is this new wording. "Formal suits are only required on board a Transatlantic cruise on Gala Evenings ..." I look forward to finding out in a few weeks what is specified for the dress code once on board QM2 for both a transatlantic crossing and a cruise to Norway.

Sorry, I don't have a better picture of the Boardwalk Cafe table setup. You can find better images elsewhere online using a google image search for QM2 Boardwalk Cafe. But I can offer this photo showing some of the deck area where the tables are set up when the Boardwalk Cafe is in use. This shot was taken with my back near the Boardwalk Cafe entrance. This does show some of the tables used for the Boardwalk Cafe stacked up in their stowed position when not in use.

FYI, I'm not sure how I managed to list Sally Gunnell OBE for voyage V310 (Southampton-Hamburg). I'm not finding any speakers for voyage V310 now. She is only mentioned for the no-longer-valid/already-sailed voyage Q313. I now figure the current list on the "Guest speakers on board page" represents 16 different voyages (of which two have already sailed). By the way, I figured there are 177 remaining voyages for 2023 by adding the 163 voyages which appear on the voyage search results plus 14 additional voyages that appear when I request "sold out" voyages. I realize now that's an over-estimate for our purposes here since it counts some voyages more than once. For example, that counts both segments of a round trip crossing as well as the round trip crossing itself. So, I should probably retract my statement concerning what percentage of the remaining 2023 voyages are represented on that speakers list. That percentage will be higher if I were to come up with a more accurate count of the number of remaining 2023 voyages for our purpose here. But then if I were to remove the two already-sailed voyages, which is a reasonable thing to do, that reduces the list of voyages with speakers mentioned to 14. That in turn reduces the percentage of remaining 2023 voyages with speakers mentioned. OK, once again I've well and truly over-analyzed this situation. 🤣

My pleasure. This is the kind of project I enjoy doing, both for my own curiosity and to help contribute to discussions such as this. I had started this project once before but apparently got distracted the first time around. I had almost completed that list of speakers this time when I saw your reply, so I added that timely reference to you just before submitting my reply.

Yeah, that happens when the 'view voyages' link provides an invalid or already-sailed voyage number. That happens now for Sally Gunnell OBE where the 'view voyages' link supplies voyage number Q313. I'm not sure that was ever a valid voyage number, but it it was, it would have referred to some portion of the recently completed Singapore-Yokohama voyage. Last year's page was riddled with links like that providing voyage numbers that were invalid or had already sailed.

This is Cunard's page which I previously described as follows. "About all Cunard publishes on their website is a "Guest speakers on board" page which provides only a very limited list of speakers. That list is mostly the speakers for special event cruises such as the Literature Festival at Sea and some of the QE Alaska voyages." I took on the task of documenting which voyages are represented on that "Guest speakers on board" page. Here is the master list of the 17 voyages for the 29 speakers currently listed on that page, sorted by voyage number (here you are @techteach). M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Yvonne Battle-Felton M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Antony Beevor M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Luigi Bonomi M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Clare Chambers M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Alex Clark M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Artemis Cooper M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Daniel Finkelstein M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Alan Johnson M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Clare Mackintosh M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Val McDermid M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Greg Mosse M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Kate Mosse M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Andrew Hunter Murray M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Jamie Susskind M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Alan Titchmarsh M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Lynda La Plante CBE Q313 - Singapore-Tokyo (Sailed) - Sally Gunnell OBE Q315 - Beatles and Beyond (Sailed) - The Bootleg Beatles Q320 - Alaska - Joseph Frey Q321 - Alaska - Jill Heinerth Q322 - Alaska - John Geiger Q323 - Alaska - Philip Gray Q323 - Alaska - George Kourounis Q324 - Alaska - Philip Gray Q325 - Alaska - Lynn Moorman Q326B - Alaska - Mensun Bound Q329 - Eastbound Transatlantic Crossing - Philip Gray Q331 - Western Mediterranean Sherree - Valentine-Daines V310 - Southampton-Hamburg - Sally Gunnell OBE V312 - Canary Islands - Yuvi V318 - Iceland and British Isles - Sherree Valentine-Daines V324 - Western Mediterranean - Pip McGarry V327 - Central Mediterranean - John Waterhouse Now 17 voyages (two of which have recently sailed) represents about 10% of the remaining 177 voyages for 2023. And with only one speaker listed for most of these voyages, that makes this list even more incomplete. I wonder if this list is limited to the designated "celebrity" speakers for these voyages. Anyway, while better than nothing, I think you'll agree this list falls well short of the master lists of guest speakers Cunard used to provide.

Here's a link to a QV bar menu. It's apparently from August 2022 since the document name is "qv_main_bar_menu_aug_2022a.pdf". It shouldn't be too far off I would think. https://www.cunard.com/content/dam/cunard/my-voyage/pdfs/qv/qv_main_bar_menu_aug_2022a.pdf

Yeah, that's an old version of the Cunard World Club Benefits page which can still be found on the Cunard US website at https://www.cunard.com/en-us/the-cunard-experience/world-club-benefits. The updated Cunard World Club page, similar to what @Splice the mainbrace has indicated, is found on the Cunard US website at https://www.cunard.com/en-us/cunard-world-club. I'm not sure if there is still a link to that old page within the Cunard US website itself. I found it via a google search. When I do a google search for Cunard World Club Benefits (the title of the old page), that old page is the first search result I receive and the new page is the second result. When I just search for Cunard World Club (the title of the new page), that gives me the new page as the first search result and the old page as the second result.