Semi-live UK and Ireland cruise on Regal - the no-frills version (September-October 2024)

[MyriamS]

57 minutes ago, EDVM96 said:

Yes, I paid 70 £ for a full day rental in Kirkwall last year (Ford Focus). Less expensive than any tour. And I could visit a lot more then on any regular tour.

Mull Head, Churchill Barriers, The Italian Chapel, Stenness Standing Stones, Ring Of Brodgar, Yesnaby Cliffs, Skara Brae + Skaill House, all that in just one port day (07:00 AM to 06:00 PM).

Sorry you missed that.

I cannot drive, so that was never option for me.

 

My partner can drive, and was reluctantly willing to do so in Kirkwall (he never drove on the left before).

 

We looked for rental cars more than 6 months ahead. One company had a car available but wanted us to send them our credit card number by email, so we politely declined. The others were already sold out. October is the shoulder season and we were the only ship in port that day. I can't imagine how crazy it must be in the summer.

[EDVM96]

10 hours ago, MyriamS said:

One company had a car available but wanted us to send them our credit card number by email, so we politely declined.

Why. That's totally normal for the small businesses without a large franchise behind.

I also mail my CC number when there is no other way. Company pais in case of fraud, anyway.
 

I saw you had nice weather in Le Havre yesterday. Hope to see some nice pictures.

 

[MyriamS]

8 hours ago, EDVM96 said:

Why. That's totally normal for the small businesses without a large franchise behind.

I also mail my CC number when there is no other way. Company pais in case of fraud, anyway.
 

I saw you had nice weather in Le Havre yesterday. Hope to see some nice pictures.

 

Email is simply not a safe way to transmit credit card details. I'd rather not do business with a company that risk my data being stolen.

 

We had absolutely beautiful weather in Le Havre, as you can see from the below photos.

 

On our last day, we enjoy the amazing Honfleur

 

I thought there would be a mega strike in Le Havre and we wouldn't stop there, but I was wrong. We docked in Le Havre as planned, so I'm back in my homeland for the day. 

 

We planned to walk from the port to the city centre (about 30 min) but we saw the 10am courtesy shuttle from BeeBus parked there. As we booked one of their tours to Honfleur, we were able to take it and save ourselves some walking.

 

I've been to most big French cities before (Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nice, Montpellier, Rennes, Strasbourg) but not to Le Havre. It has a reputation for being one of the ugliest cities of France. An industrial port, heavily bombed during WW2 and hastily rebuilt in concrete, I have to agree that it is not easy on the eyes. The weather was exceptionally sunny though.

 

On Place Auguste Perret, we saw the war memorial, the volcano-shaped theatre and the mushroom-shaped library before heading for our 11am Honfleur tour.

We could have taken the public bus but the schedule is not very convenient on Saturday. Also since 90% of French people like to moan about cruise ships, I thought I would give money to a local business that draws its success from them instead. The price was 26€ pp for the bus transfers including commentary and 3h free time in Honfleur.

 

It was Saturday (which is market day in France) and very sunny, so Honfleur was bustling. It is a very charming city, with the half-timbered houses typical of the area. Here is the Vieux Bassin.

 

We went into Sainte-Catherine's wooden church and climbed the Mont-Joli for great views of Honfleur and Le Havre (can you spot the hidden Regal Princess?)

 

 

We had 3h in Honfleur and thought it would be too much since we weren't having lunch, but it was perfect. Highly recommend this beautiful place.

 

We took the bus just before 3pm and were back in the cruise ship at 3.30pm for a slice of pizza on the top deck. Unfortunately after half an hour, they started blasting Premier League football on the big screen, so it was back to our cabin - and to our packing. 

 

For dinner in the MDR, we both started with the salmon cake, then my partner had the seafood cocktail and I had the tropical fruit soup, which was basically a smoothie served on a plate. 🙂 The salmon cake was very good and came with a perfect poached egg.

 

For mains, we both had the prime rib, which was perfectly cooked as usual. They brought horseradish and sour cream for the baked potato table side. 

For dessert, I had the baked Alaska and my partner had the cherry sorbet with caramel cream. The Alaska was drenched in Hershey's chocolate syrup and the meringue was kinda grainy so I wouldn't recommend it.

On the last day there is only one farewell variety show but we didn't fancy seeing it. Instead we had one last trivia, where we teamed up with the same American couple again. We got their business card so we'll be sure to visit their ranch if we're ever in Texas! It was nice to make some friends on the cruise. 🙂

[MyriamS]

Disembarkation day

 

I didn't sleep very well last night as I kept expecting our cabin to vibrate as we docked in Southampton. The changing of time zones were in our favour this time as we got up at 6.40am easily (7.40am in the France/Germany time zone).

 

Usually we self-disembark, but Princess only offered two slots for that: 7.15am and 8.40am, too early and too late respectively. So we opted for regular disembarkation at 8am and just threw away the unnecessary luggage tags. 

 

With the lines in the buffet and even for the toilets being hectic, we were in the Princess Theatre at 8'o clock sharp. There were no screens and no announcements. After nervously waiting for a little while, we decide to just walk off the ship. No one stopped us and there were no lines.

 

Usually we take the direct train to London. However it is not running from Southampton Central today due to planned engineering works. We didn't fancy taking the dreaded bus replacement service or a taxi up to Southampton Airport Parkway to catch the train there. Instead we booked National Express bus tickets to London Victoria, since it was very cheap and didn't take much longer than the train. 

 

We walked about half an hour to the coach station. Since it was quite early on a rainy Sunday morning, the streets of Southampton were pretty much empty, which was a bit eerie.

 

The coach station was packed through. It is not designed very well so a huge mass of people and luggage has to squeeze in the tight space in front of the station. Arguments broke out about reserved seating that had been double booked. 

 

Eventually they did manage to check everyone in and we left only five minutes late. We were actually five minutes early to London Victoria, so their schedule is pretty much spot on.

 

Since it wasn't raining anymore, we did the Rick Steves audioguide tour from Big Ben to Trafalgar Square, then on to nearby Covent Garden for lunch with my sister. The streets were absolutely packed with people. 

 

We went to Mother Mash Covent Garden for traditional British food. First steak and ale pie with cheesy mash:

Then a proper sticky toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream: 

 

The price were reasonable for Central London and the food was very tasty! My sister will be back for sausage and mash.

 

We walked on to London Blackfriars, stopping to buy snacks on the way for the plane, then took the Thameslink service to Gatwick Airport. It's not my favourite airport by any means, but the flights for this cruise were so pricey the best option was to go with Easyjet and stuff all our belongings into 2 small cabin bags. 🙂

 

Our flight was only delayed by about 15 min, and we are now on the train back home! I'll post my final thoughts and score for the cruise tomorrow.

 

[MyriamS]

Hi everyone! I was a bit delayed with the final review as work got crazy as soon as I returned. Let me gather those final thoughts... 

 

The ship - 8/10. To me, the Regal Princess feels smol. All the public areas are on deck 5-7, centered around the piazza, and deck 16-18, around the pool area. The latter is mostly outdoors, and on an UK and Ireland cruise, there weren't many people there. This made the inside areas feels somewhat cramped, the grand atrium looks really small in person vs on videos. Unlike the P&O Iona, this ship was clearly not designed for cold weather itineraries.

On the upside though, the pools and even hot tubes were never crowded. The pools were slightly heated, which was amazing, and they were beautiful. I really like the decor on Regal: unlike Iona, it does not suffer from what I call the "airport lounge syndrome" where every newly built ship or hotel has this modern, sterile design that makes it look like an airport lounge. The Regal has its own identity, which is classy and traditional. It doesn't have any amusement park features like the water slides, climbing walls, mini golf, surf simulator... but that might be exactly what you're looking for. My partner is very active and missed them. 

 

The cabin - 7/10. First I will acknowledge we took the cheapest possible cabin that wasn't a guarantee: if we'd booked earlier and chosen our cabin, we might have had a better experience. We were on deck 9 (so roughly in the middle) at the very front of the ship. Therefore, our cabin was really sensitive to the movement of ship in rough seas, which is normal for this cabin location. What felt less normal was: each time we arrived or left port, the whole ship started vibrating. It was more prominent in our cabin, but we could feel it in other places as well, like the theatre or dining room. It's something I've never experienced on the other ships we've been before (Explorer of the Seas and Iona) and it could be very annoying if you like to sleep in. We called it the Princess alarm clock: our cabin is shaking, time to go into port. 🙂 When anchoring, we also heard 3 or 4 deafening crashes. Again as it was in the morning, it didn't bother us too much, but we had a large suite right next to us and I would never pay that amount of money to be in that location. On the upside, there were no noises from guests or other venues.

The cabin itself was good, very comfortable bed. The only downside is that they put a sensor right in front of the bathroom that floods the cabin with light each time someone gets up to go to the toilet at night. We tried to cover it with tape but sometimes it still activated and woke me up. 

 

The technology - 5/10. There is an app. It broadly works: you can make dinner reservation, see the scheduled activities and bookmark them. However it is lacking some functionalities: you can't see the MDR menus more than a day in advance (at least when I tried, it said they weren't loaded in yet), you can search activities by name but they don't have any kind of categories (like all trivia, or everything in Princess Theatre). There is a map but following the path on it isn't easy. Also the Medallion location tracking thing does not always work: my partner spent half an hour looking for me on Deck 7, because the app told him I was there. I was in our cabin on deck 9 and hadn't even stopped anywhere near that location. 

Ultimately these are all nitpicks. The reason this is rated so low is because their deposit transaction got my credit card cancelled. Instead of charging me a 100$ deposit, that somehow got separated into 1$, 0$ and 0$ and that triggered my bank fraud prevention system. Now part of it is my bank being overzealous, but it is also Princess' fault (the guest service officer even acknowledged they had a new payment system that was a bit quirky). I travel a lot internationally and had many hotels, plus P&O and RCI, take a deposit from that card and never had an issue before. So European travellers beware. 

 

The itinerary - 7/10. We chose to cruise UK and Ireland in the autumn knowing the weather could be quite poor. However, except for a day of continuous pouring rain in Stonehenge one day before embarkation, the weather on the cruise itself ranged from decent (a bit chilly, a shower here and there) to excellent (warm and sunny all day). The reason this is rated a bit low is threefold:

- We missed Dublin due to high winds. Now I know ports can be missed due to weather on any cruise, but I feel Dublin is more sensitive to this because it is a tender port in the open sea (unlike Edinburgh where we tendered in a more sheltered spot in the Firth of Forth). So while I really like Dublin, I think it is better visited not on a cruise.

- I was underwhelmed by Cork. Maybe Cobh would have been better, but we docked in Ringaskiddy. This is something Princess didn't communicate about until the last possible minute, which wasn't very transparent. 

- I know this will upset the Orkney fans in this forum but this is another place that shouldn't be a cruise port in my opinion. They've got the docking infrastructure but literally nothing else: we couldn't hire a car, we couldn't take the bus, and our hike was unpleasant, bordering on unsafe. I had back pain for three days afterwards. So I stick to my guns, I wouldn't recommend the Orkney Islands to anyone. 

Ports that we appreciated were: Belfast for the stunning Giant's Causeway (can recommend the shorex by Belfast City Sightseeing), Liverpool which is not the most touristy city but has the most convenient docking point and plenty to explore on foot, Glasgow for the impressive Stirling Castle, the charming Edinburgh, Le Havre for the beautiful Honfleur (can recommend the Beebus transfer). 

 

The food - 8/10. We found the food to be broadly similar to our first cruise on Royal Carribbean. There were things we liked more on Royal, such as the MDR breakfast menu and bread basket, and others we liked more on Princess, such as the pizza by the slice and the desserts. The food was definitely the best on the last sea day, where they had a seafood buffet for lunch and lobster night in the MDR. With cruise lines continuously cutting on food budgets, we really appreciate that Princess kept those special events, especially my partner who never had lobster before.

 

The service - 10/10. We found all crew members to be friendly and efficient. Furthermore the officers were a lot more visible than on the other ships we've been on. The captain did a welcome talk, the senior officers participated in various talks and demonstrations. The most active officer was the entertainment director (administrative position above cruise director) who was always around cracking jokes.

 

The entertainment - 9/10. The daytime entertainment was centered around chill activities like trivia, enrichment talk and movies. My partner loves trivia so he was very happy. The enrichment talks were mixed: we liked Pete Best and the Royal Butler but weren't too convinced by the destination expert. Also 80% of the the talks were by one person, about one topic (rock bands), so that felt a bit repetitive.

The evening entertainment was made up of game shows, production shows and guest entertainers. The latter were all very good: the two magicians Martin Brock and Ottavio Belli, the Beatles tribute act Just John and Paul, and the ventriloquist Gareth Oliver (we didn't see the vocalists but I'm sure they were good too). We only see two production shows: Born to Dance and Bravo. The performers were all very talented but they didn't really have a story or characters, so I liked them less than the production shows on P&O. 

 

 

Overall I would give this cruise a score of 8/10. I would recommend this cruise: 

- if you're looking for a traditional but still relaxed cruise experience (no dress code), without the amusement park features of the big mainstream lines. 

- if you prefer adult-only cruising: this cruise was 12 nights outside of school holidays so there were very few children on board.

- if you are over 60s or are travelling with passengers over 60. There were also very few people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and even fewer traveling without older family members. We were asked several times why we were here: "are you newlyweds?", "are you with your parents?" or my favourite "are you dancers?". 🙂 While these people did not meant to be rude, and most passengers were indeed lovely, I felt very out of place sometimes. It felt like being in a retirement home, but a fun one that I wouldn't mind joining in 30 years. 🙂

Edited October 9 by MyriamS