P&O Iona Christmas and New year 2022/23

Worst Christmas & New Year’s Eve cruise (G240) in our experience of many years cruising at Christmas & New Year. Logistics for seating everyone for these two festive meals proved a near impossible task from where we stood – to the extent of using the Horizon (the ‘canteen’ however you dress it up) to take the ‘overflow’ – the meal on the evening of Christmas day saw us waiting well over an hour, being seated at circa 9:30 pm and not leaving until 11:00 pm. Our pre-preference dining time booking requested by P&O duly filled in and sent off a month before the cruise had ‘disappeared’ so we were informed we had no booking! Hotel management requested passengers seek confirmation of their dining arrangements at a designated location – we had a 2 hour wait to be told we had no booking! Other passengers we understand had the same problem. We had not therefore been allocated a table – the Horizon is where we ended up! All our planning and expectations gone! All dressed up and nowhere to go but the Horizon! For the New Year’s Eve meal, we were given the option of joining the virtual queue which we did for the Pearl restaurant at 8:00 pm – again more stress and after half hour wait and asking why were we having to wait a table suddenly appeared – many tables around us that evening were set up for dining but remained empty – indication again of shortage of staff to deal with what had become an unenjoyable stressful experience. Onboard Holiday App was unreliable – theatre bookings were cancelled – staff were not dealing with the passengers who had booked their dining – they were inundated with long queues of passengers who were being seated without at the same time dealing with the passengers who had booked their dining. From our perspective, it appeared that there were too many passengers which caused the dilemma occurring whereby the overflow took over the Horizon. It remains a mystery as to where all our pre-dining preference requests which we and other passengers had filled in a month prior to the cruise disappeared!!! We will be cruising again but we are certainly not in a hurry to go back on the Iona for a Christmas & New Year’s cruise. The staff were exemplary in the manner in which they were dealing with angry passengers in a situation which had been foisted upon them – well done staff.