We have enjoyed over 30 cruises with P&O but we won’t be going on Arvia again.
The ship is beautiful but it seems that it’s being aimed at families and not the older generation.
It clearly stated on our daily newsletter, smart casual and no shorts in the evening, but lots of people wore shorts (not even smart ones) sometimes with a T shirt and flip flops, this is not what we’re used to and P&O didn’t enforce the rule.
The retreat on board, which we thought was for adults, was full of children and yet again nobody from P&O said anything.
We always had a can of water in the fridge on arrival but this has stopped, we asked for petit four with our coffee but that has stopped, we used to get free cake when purchasing from Costa, but it is now £2.75 a slice, our friends dined in limelight club which is an extra cost for a meal and a show, but when they asked for coffee they were told that they could buy one from Costa! These are all minor things but they made all the difference to cruising, it doesn’t feel special any more.
We were expecting a peninsular club party, but it didn’t happen, instead, we had a free drink.
We found that everywhere on the ship was noisy, even when you were relaxing on the decks there was constant music playing, we tried putting towels over the speakers to make it quieter.
We hope that it’s only on this big ship that they have made these changes as we have booked more cruises on their smaller ships.
