Tom Burke’s Blog

The topic of Ventura’s Christmas/New Year cruise won’t go away. There’s been quite a bit of press coverage, and yesterday there was a lengthy segment of Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 programme about it. One thing that especially strikes me about all this coverage are the very vituperative remarks about the alleged misbehavers: all the ‘chav’ comments. What could cause such ill feeling?

Well, I wonder if it could in part be envy, or frustration? I’ve just been looking at some of the prices for this cruise, which I believe was cruise N822/822A, which was broadly from 19/20 December to 3/4 January. Back in the P&O 2008 1st Edition brochure – the first time this cruise would have been mentioned, and the ‘Ventura launch’ brochure – a standard category JD balcony cabin was listed at £2,319 (the full ‘brochure price was £4,209 but anyone who’s cruised knows that you don’t pay any attention to full brochure prices). Reductions for cabin sharing (for 3rd and 4th occupants) were pretty small: 70% of the OH cabin rate for an infant, 15% for someone 16 and under, 10% for an adult (which would include a 17-year old child, of course). This is typical of the price markup for a cruise over Christmas & the New Year – the very similar cruises either side of Christmas were a lot less. Most TAs would have discounted those fares somewhat, but even so N822 was an expensive cruise for an early booker: a family of four (two parents and two children aged, say, 6 to 16) would have paid up to £8,500 for that JD cabin.

So I can well understand that if those who had paid that much learned that others on the same cruise had paid 50% of that amount, or less, for a similar cabin they might well be upset. Yes, intellectually we all know that if you were happy  to pay that amount when you booked it you ought still to be happy today; but in real-life, that’s not how it works, is it? So I suspect that there may have been some bitterness about the discounted prices. Add to that the fact that the ship must have been well over 100% occupancy (i.e. lots of 3rd & 4th occupancy beds occupied) and therefore very crowded; and three ports of call were cancelled, thus keeping all the passengers onboard in the pressure-cooker, and it’s not surprising that incidents happened, and caused so much bitterness.

All that said, I can’t help thinking that the whole thing appears to have been an unedifying spectacle, not only of the alleged behaviour of some but also of the appallingly prejudiced expressions of outrage from others. But I wonder how I would have felt if I’d been on board? I suspect it’s easy to be reasonable when you’ve not been subject to the pressures, and you haven’t spent £8,000.

Let’s go back to happier topics. Arcadia’s World Voyage seems to be proceeding smoothly; she’s in Athens today. There’s a good blog about it here, from James Cusick who’s a senior member of the crew.

It’s not been an especially good week for P&O.

First they had the embarrassing experience of Arcadia suffering a delay in starting her “world voyage” (Southampton to Asia & Australia and back, via the Med in both directions). She was supposed to leave on 5 January but was delayed until 4pm the following day. The problem was a failure of her ‘emergency backup generator’, and the delay was caused by the need to fly parts to Southampton from the manufacturer in Italy. Passengers had boarded on the 5th, of course, and during the delay on the 6th they were offered the opportunity of a tour of Southampton, or at least transport into Southampton city centre. I understand that nearly 1/3 of them took up this offer…. Arcadia is now on her way but as a result of the delay calls at ports for the first couple of weeks or so will be one day later than published. The half-day call at Salalah (Oman) on 20 January will be missed altogether, and after that she should be back on the published schedule.

More worryingly for P&O is this story: ‘Ocean cruise ends in almighty brawl‘. This is not the sort of story P&O want about their current flagship. Of course, it might be that it has been blown up out of all proportion; I’ll be looking for first-hand accounts from this cruise on the various bulletin boards with interest. It may well be that many other passengers will have been completely unaware of the problems – Ventura is a big ship and if you weren’t actually in the vicinity of the incident you wouldn’t know anything about it.

Nonetheless, it may be that as a result of their strong marketing of Ventura as a family ship, P&O is attracting families who are not familiar with cruising, and with whom P&O itself is not familiar. Culture clashes are bound to result in this situation. It also highlights the fact that P&O’s next ship, Azura (which will be a sister to Ventura) is not being marketed as a specifically family-based ship. I await more information about Azura with interest. In the meantime I have to point out that we enjoyed our autumn cruise on Ventura very much; however, it was during the school term. Click here for the posts I did from Ventura during our cruise.

My conclusion is that I suspect that the ‘Ventura experience’ varies with the time of year more than most.