Cunard Insight

[bluemarble]

Cunard issued a press release a couple days ago announcing an Insights guest lecturer for QM2's voyage M014, May 20-24, 2020. Quoting the first paragraph from that press release:

 

Cunard Welcomes Celebrated Author Annie Barrows as Guest Speaker to Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Guernsey

 

VALENCIA, Calif., January 21, 2020 – Cunard has announced that The New York Times best-selling author Annie Barrows will sail on flagship ocean liner Queen Mary 2 as part of the luxury cruise line’s renowned Insights program on a Bruges and Guernsey voyage, May 20-24, 2020 (M014). While sailing on the four-night voyage roundtrip from Southampton, England, Barrows will offer guests a lecture on her background and experience writing her novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

[Ray66]

I'm on that cruise so thank you for the information.

[bluemarble]

Well, we're almost a full month into 2020 and Cunard has finally posted links to the latest Insights Guest Lecturers lists on "cunard.com".

 

It's easy enough to find those speaker lists on the Cunard US website via "The experience", "Guest speakers". That leads to this page with a URL ending in "guest-speakers" (with a hyphen) where links to the speaker lists are found near the bottom as usual.

 

https://www.cunard.com/en-us/the-cunard-experience/guest-speakers

 

On the Cunard UK website however, following the path "The experience", "Guest speakers" leads to this different page with a URL ending in "guestspeakers" (without the hyphen). That page does not contain any links to the guest speaker lists that I can see. Rather, it just contains links to some of the individual featured speakers, mostly speakers on special event cruises.

 

https://www.cunard.com/en-gb/the-cunard-experience/guestspeakers

 

But links to the guest speaker lists can be found on the Cunard UK website at this URL ending in "guest-speakers", the same as on the Cunard US website.

 

https://www.cunard.com/en-gb/the-cunard-experience/guest-speakers

 

It looks like the same trick works on the Cunard Australia website where links to the guest speaker lists can be found here.

 

https://www.cunard.com/en-au/the-cunard-experience/guest-speakers

[fizzy1]

Cant wait till we know who will be on the Beatles and Beyond week out of Hong Kong !! Long wait till Oct 2021 though !!!

[bluemarble]

After posting how to find the Insights Guest Lecturers lists on the Cunard UK and Australia websites yesterday, I see today they have rearranged the menu options on the UK home page. There is no longer a "The experience" option, but rather an "Explore" option. Under that "Explore" option, the "Guest speakers" link takes you to the page with the URL ending in "guest-speakers" (with the hyphen). So it's once again easy to find the guest speaker lists on the Cunard UK site.

 

Looks like this change hasn't made it to the Cunard Australia site yet though, so finding the speaker lists there isn't quite so easy.

[erniebernie]

Hi I can only see Guest Speakers up to April on QE  is that all there is showing or am I doing something wrong?  Looking for September 2020. 

[bluemarble]

14 minutes ago, erniebernie said:

Hi I can only see Guest Speakers up to April on QE  is that all there is showing or am I doing something wrong?  Looking for September 2020. 

 

No, you are not doing anything wrong. I'm afraid the latest QE list only extends as far as April 20. The QM2 list only goes as far as June 21. On the other hand, the QV list covers all of 2020 (although the QV list is rather sparse when it gets to October into December with only one speaker listed for most of the voyages in those months).

Edited January 30, 2020 by bluemarble

[bluemarble]

On 12/21/2019 at 9:29 AM, bluemarble said:

Just so you know, that princess website where those pdfs reside is the "OneSource Travel Agent Center" for both Princess and Cunard. It's not really intended for customers to use. Access to many of the functions on that site is limited by a travel agent login. But the page with the links to the Insights Guest Lecturers lists happens to be open to the public and can be found in the results of a google search.

 

For whatever reason, the speaker lists are posted there first. When the new Cunard websites were first introduced, they did not have "Guest speaker" pages, so that was the only source for the speaker lists for a while. Now, sometimes those lists make it to the Cunard websites in a few days. Sometimes it takes considerably longer. And sometimes updated lists with only a few revisions from the previous versions never make it to the Cunard websites. Now that the links to the speaker lists seem to have been removed from the Cunard UK website, one wonders if these latest speaker lists for 2020 will be posted there at all.

 

So that's why we still find ourselves having to play the game of looking for the latest speaker lists on a site other than the main customer-facing Cunard websites.

 

Well, I guess it was inevitable. I've just discovered that pages on the "OneSource" website that used to be open to the public are now restricted to travel agents. That includes the page with links to the latest lists of Insights Guest Lecturers. Attempts to bring up that page now redirect me to a travel agent login page instead.

 

In the grand scheme of things, with all the uncertainty about when voyages will resume and what the experience will be like, being able to get a sneak peek at upcoming lists of Insights Guest Lecturers is pretty low on the list of priorities. But I thought I'd mention that it looks like I won't be able to provide previews of those speaker lists any more. I suppose we'll just have to rely on the links to the lists of speakers posted on the main Cunard websites from now on.