Advice please - such a late embarkation time

[PrincessPete]

Hi, we have just seen our e-tickets are available for our 28 nighter on Oriana on 22 February. Although we are in one of the highest balcony grades the embarkation time is shown as 1500 hours (having said that I don't know if the higher the grade means an earlier slot but thought it might?).

Waiting until 1500 hours would make for a very long day as we are staying at a hotel in Southampton the night before.

From anyone's experience are we likely to be allowed to board the ship if we arrived earlier, say at around 1300 hours?

Any advice appreciated.

Kind regards. Peter

Edited January 13, 2019 by PrincessPete
Spelling

[Les_ldh]

You can arrive as early as you want, but be prepared to be asked to wait. Passengers arriving after you at their allotted time will have priority. Having said that, on my last trip I had a boarding time of 2:30pm, arrived an hour early, and got straight on.

 

Les.

[daiB]

20 minutes ago, PrincessPete said:

Hi, we have just seen our e-tickets are available for our 28 nighter on Oriana on 22 February. Although we are in one of the highest balcony grades the embarkation time is shown as 1500 hours (having said that I don't know if the higher the grade means an earlier slot but thought it might?).

Waiting until 1500 hours would make for a very long day as we are staying at a hotel in Southampton the night before.

From anyone's experience are we likely to be allowed to board the ship if we arrived earlier, say at around 1300 hours?

Any advice appreciated.

Kind regards. Peter

 

The boarding times are done by deck order. But not ABCDE or even EDCBA. And they are different for each ship.

 

Getting there at 13.00 should cause no problems and you may be lucky and get on soon. 

[AndyMichelle]

Hi Peter,

We have found Southampton to have a fantastic system for boarding that really is fair to everybody.

On arrival, you will be given a coloured card, for instance green for those on time and red for early arrivers.

Green will be called first, but as soon as the queue is at a manageable level, reds will get called. 

Arriving early is perfectly acceptable, but those arriving on time will rightly get priority. We have never waited more than half an hour. 

On the smaller ships, everything seems to run smoothly in our experience.

Have a great time,

Andy

[Eglesbrech]

They will take your luggage from you from about noon (sometimes earlier) so you could always drop it off and then do something in Southampton.

 

There are some nice restaurants and pubs for a bite to eat or if you have not visited previously the Seacity museum is worth a visit.

 

As others have said if you prefer to just wait you might be lucky and get onboard earlier than your time.

[Clodia]

If you arrive at 2, which tends to be when the coaches get there, you may have a long wait. However if you get there nearer 1 o clock, on the smaller ships like Oriana, it's quite likely that you'll only wait about half an hour.

The cabin you book has nothing to do with your embarkation time unless it's a suite, when you get priority boarding, as you do with frequent cruises which take you to Caribbean, Baltic or Ligurian tier. I do sympathise; before I got to Caribbean I always seemed to get 3.30 whatever cruise I booked. But by arriving about one, I usually didn't have to wait too long.

[Presto2]

7 hours ago, PrincessPete said:

Hi, we have just seen our e-tickets are available for our 28 nighter on Oriana on 22 February. Although we are in one of the highest balcony grades the embarkation time is shown as 1500 hours (having said that I don't know if the higher the grade means an earlier slot but thought it might?).

Waiting until 1500 hours would make for a very long day as we are staying at a hotel in Southampton the night before.

From anyone's experience are we likely to be allowed to board the ship if we arrived earlier, say at around 1300 hours?

Any advice appreciated.

Kind regards. Peter

 

On Ventura we just turned up at about 11.30am despite being given 4pm as we had been in Southampton for 2 days and took our time, expecting to have to wait for a few hours.  It was really quiet and hardly anyone else there ! Staff knew we had a later time and still ushered us on quickly (in a nice way) telling us that some coaches had arrived so we would be better getting through quickly. We were pleasantly surprised.

Edited January 13, 2019 by Presto2

[ozzysdad]

40 minutes ago, Presto2 said:

 

On Ventura we just turned up at about 11.30am despite being given 4pm as we had been in Southampton for 2 days and took our time, expecting to have to wait for a few hours.  It was really quiet and hardly anyone else there ! Staff knew we had a later time and still ushered us on quickly (in a nice way) telling us that some coaches had arrived so we would be better getting through quickly. We were pleasantly surprised.

We had a similar experience boarding Azura last year, stayed over in Southampton and had to check out at noon so made our way to the terminal and expected to wait a couple of hours at least for our scheduled 3pm boarding time only to be called forward about 40 minutes after arriving, we were sat in the buffet at around 2pm and our cases were outside our cabin when  we returned after lunch, all in all it was a very pleasant, painless experience.