Britannia

Before I start my recent cruise review on Britannia I would like to comment on the booking procedures experience, with Bolsover it was very straightforward however p&o not so good. Gone are the days when you booked and then received everything automatically through the post now everything comes by email and it goes on and on with countless emails for one thing or another and then you have to check in and print luggage labels off, personally I’m ok doing that however I have friends who are not and find it very difficult to navigate so much so that it is putting them of cruising. We have just done a Caribbean cruise on Britannia and on the whole we had a positive experience with one or two exceptions which were the old chestnut which everyone seems to complain about people hogging sun beds and leaving towels and bags on beds when they are not using them and yet p&o just ignore this. Yes they put signs up saying this is not permitted but no one takes any notice including p&o, they say if a sun bed is left for the stated amount of time passengers can remove towels and use them which can lead to arguments, the responsibility for removing the towels should be on p&o, not the passenger. They make the rules so they should enforce them as i for one are not going to engage in an argument over a sun bed and because of this struggle to get one. The other thing is booking restaurants on app, had trouble getting into speciality restaurants as they seemed to be booked up most of the time and when we tried to get into the freedom dining it was usually one hours wait so I think freedom is the wrong word to use as to me freedom means dine when you want within reason but not having to wait an hour, apart from these couple of things everything else was positive, staff was great food, on the whole, was ok, the cabin was kept very clean by the very nice very polite Joseph who nothing was to much trouble no matter how busy he was which he was all of the time. Don’t know if p&o have cut down on staff but there seemed not to be as many as usual and the staff that were there worked extremely hard to make the passengers experience enjoyable.