Megabear2

No discount I'm afraid. Bought mine on Friday - Commodore.

Yes, I've sailed on Allure Caribbean from FL many times and also a transatlantic relocation from Barcelona. I've always had the same experience wherever she was sailing from.

It's meant to be 30 minutes but as you know P&O rarely act on people abusing the sunbeds. If you are sitting there all day no problem. We choose not to sit in the sun all day, as a cancer survivor more than once I'd feel very uncomfortable doing this. Clearly it's a personal choice how people spend their time. In our case we like to go off to lectures or events when we like and therefore cannot camp on sunbeds or seats all day if we wish to play by the rules. Lunch for us is a relaxed affair being served in somewhere like the MDR or Glass House, again over an hour. This difference in holiday experience goes someway to explaining why a lot of us pay fof the balconies.

There will be a pantomime, chocolate/cake village, santa will be in his house, lots of Christmas decorations everywhere, carol concerts, carol singers in the public areas, events will be themed. Santa arrives on deck Christmas eve. The Christmas dinner is an extended traditional menu served on two fixed settings even for freedom diners. There are a couple of special Christmas themed concerts and performances in the theatre. Special Christmas themed drinks, cocktails and food are on offer.

The outside space is very much the winner. We too are out and about extremely early, more because we like the cooler air in the morning and as you know swim first thing before the rush. However we do not stay sitting on our "claimed" seats for more than a couple of hours on seadays preferring to go for a proper lunch. Following the proper etiquette (that sounds good!) we have to surrender our seats at that point which means if we want outside space later we are most likely going to struggle to find two new ones. The balcony offers that choice to sit and watch the sea, read a book or just generally have a chat and enjoy each others company. Even when I travel solo it can be difficult to find a seat after lunch outside on thr bigger ships. Funnily enough the very biggest I sailed was Allure of the Seas and the number of beds, seats and amount of room seemed far superior but it could have been an illusion!

That depends very much on when you book and the type of cabin as well. This cruise replaces an Arvia Christmas cruise booked at launch for which an ordinary deck 12 balcony cabin and economy flights was to cost £7100. Having travelled on Arvia in May this year I decided it wasn't for us and moved to the one I mention above. Yes, it's not Christmas but we booked a replacement with Celebrity for less - see above - albeit one day less, it is however fully inclusive and we were lucky there was a 75% second passenger offer at the time of booking. Looking at the Caribbean cruises released for 2025/6 the prices are high at launch again.

That's another price increase then. It was £409 for my January cruise which I booked in June.

Correct. I agree about seat booking fees. Apart from these P&O flights I have never booked seats in advance. In the past year we did book one flight in advance based on my husband having hurt his leg and wanting an aisle seat. The airlines play on the fear factor and people being worried they won't be seated together. If everybody refused to book and pay there would be little the airlines could do! P&O however have raised their charges to considerably more than the average and I would guess they'll raise the cost again for 2024. In the UK only Ryanair have an algorithm designed to actively split people up. However their standard seat reservation charge is fairly low at £4.00 with the most expensive at £15.00. There is no doubt it is and will remain contentious and until the report is finalised the airlines can cash in. P&O are able to hide amongst the confusion as the passengers automatically blames the airline for cashing in. Win win.

I assume you flew Virgin Premium Economy if your seats were free. Normal Economy seats with them are free at check in. They also charge for extra legroom seats as do most other airlines. You may of course be very high up in their loyalty club so able to get for free earlier than check in. The seat charge on the P&O flights is set by them not the airlines. Maleth seat charge is also £45pp so clearly as they are exclusively a charter company it would be too much of a coincidence. The charge made by P&O is a long way out with most other airlines, and the increase they made in charges this year put them a long way ahead of their rivals and it is obviously an easy way for them to cash in. The worst aspect of this is the Premium economy flight charge, it is extremely unreasonable to expect people to pay another £180 on top of the cost of booking for that cabin. This is an interesting site https://www.alternativeairlines.com/airlines-with-free-seat-selection

That's very interesting. Thank you. I'd best ask a few more questions as to what sort of deal it is! The quoted prices are nearly £650 less than the P&O fares which did seem a very large difference.

Since my travel agent friend retired I have generally made my cruise and holiday bookings direct with the cruise lines. However a particular cruise I want to book has appeared on a number of agent's websites with quite a large reduction so I though I might on this occasion use one. I have noticed, however, that a number of these agents are requesting deposits which are larger than the amount P&O request. Is this normal with the online travel agents?

Don't forget to fill in the new mobility form in your cruise personaliser if you haven't already done so. Have a lovely cruise.

Row 12 is the bulkhead in the middle so assumedly the lady will take the aisle seat of the three window side and the gentleman the middle aisle seat. I'm confused by the "extra legroom" situation as these are the extra legroom seats apart from the exit row 32. To Harrison6 these are actually the most sought after economy seats as there is considerable legroom compared to other seats. The front bulkhead at row 12 is far better than row 32 as the seats in that row are by a door so colder and also very close to the lavatories where people queue. The bulkhead/legroom is why you've paid extra. A "normal" seat is £45pp each way so £180 to reserve. If you were saying you wanted Premium Economy these would cost you around £1,000 to book and reserve. Hope that helps.

He does on all the ships. Mind you he has a busy night nipping from one continent to the other so let's hope the skies are clear.

Thank you. I managed to purchase today. I was the operator's last customer before he leaves P&O. No doubt the wait will be worthwhile. Hope your holiday is going well.

They endeavour to keep you together. As a couple it may be across an aisle. Best to get to the check in early. The return journey is allocated onboard by P&O and is much more random with no chance to ask for a change.

One of my banks encouraged me to use the paying in machine. When I said I'd rather use the counter and surely that was better for her she told me HO looks at the machines and if a certain amount of use doesn't occur the branch is considered as at risk of closure. Couldn't understand at first then she explained it was expected the machine handled "X" transactions an hour compared to the counter person with "Y" and if the overall total wasn't "Z" it was felt the branch was under used. Seemed totally crazy to me. The change machine gives you a slip to pay into your account so you can choose to use the counter if you wish, just lose the bagging up bit.

It's getting greener for the P&O staff too! Having just had my worse wait in months to speak to them to buy my wine package i just got a guy who said Congratulations you're going to be my last ever customer! Transpires he's leaving his job and 5.00pm is finish for him. He's leaving the travel industry completely to go into catering - you've not been headhunting have you ICF.

I love those machines! My OH runs a football side and the lads all pay in cash. Strangely no one ever puts a note in and I had the dubious honour of counting and bagging it every month. The bank my OH uses doesn't have the counting machine so I take the money to my own bank and get it put in my account and then do a quick transfer to the other bank. It saves me a good hour of huffing and puffing and double checking. And for good measure I'm being good and visiting two banks to keep them open. Actually we're very lucky as every major bank has a branch open here, we only lost TSB and RBS (the latter we can use Natwest for though so not a real loss). I think we are a very rare animal now.

This one has been well repeated. My memory serves: price was dropped significantly before sailing, itinerary was changed quite a lot and less ports as a result, once sailingports were missed and there was a very long period at sea before the next stop, the ship sailed late - around 11.00pm if I recall, US immigration took until 4.30pm in the afternoon, two glasses of wine were nearly £20, the food was cold, the menu held little variety ... You get the idea. The gentleman unfortunately was unhappy with most of the cruise, I recall he wanted to get off after a week or so. This was one of the 35 night cruises. He's now very active on the Princess board so I assume he's moved to their ships for his next cruise.

Told you we knew nothing about wine ..

Nearly every day on our cruise is a port day ...

Excellent... which package as I can't see it on the list! Leaflet-Wine-Packages-23-(POC) (4)-2.pdf

I'd be very cross if it's not open on my Britannia cruise in January. Have they given a reason?

Your inside would have been the identical size. Yes, they are tight. Mind you Arvia's are even tighter yet I saw lots of babies and children going into them.