Cruises in 2008
We have two cruises booked for 2008.
Both are with P&O, and both are from Southampton. So having started our cruising in 2005 with a fly-cruise on a foreign cruise line where english was little spoken, we have now decided to cruise from the UK with a very British company! I think our reasons for doing so are to avoid the flights; we don’t mind flying per se but we have begin to find this more and more of an inconvenience. In 2007, for example, for our cruise on Galaxy we requested direct flights from the UK to Civitavecchia, and these are only available from Heathrow. Furthermore they leave very early in the morning (7am), so we had to have an overnight stay at a Heathrow hotel the night before. Whereas in 2008 we can stay at home the night before the cruise, get up at the normal time, and then have an (fairly) easy drive straight to Southampton, arriving just before our timed embarkation slot. And when we disembark, we’ll just get into our car and drive home – no more hanging around airports all day. It should be much easier.
Now for the cruises themselves. We have been thinking about P&O for a couple of years, and in 2006 we actually visited one of their ships, Oceana, in Southampton one morning, and we liked what we saw but by that time we had already booked our 2007 cruises. I posted some pictures from the visit here. But we came away definitely feeling that we wanted to cruise with P&O sometime, and when we got the 2008 brochure I was probably expecting to book something like a 7-night Norwegian Fjords cruise on Oceana. Then I started reading about Ventura, their forthcoming new ship; and then I started looking at the prices for cruises on Ventura; and the upshot is that our main cruise in 2008 will be a 12-night Canary Islands cruise on Ventura starting on 28 September. We’ll be in a balcony cabin, too – our first – but on Ventura balcony cabins are the most common type. Ventura herself enters service in April. (She’s a close sister to Crown Princess, by the way.)
That’s a bit late in the year so we then started looking for a shorter cruise in the spring. I was tempted by a Royal Caribbean cruise for 4 nights from Barcelona on one of their big ships, but in the end I decided that the hassle of flying to & from Barcelona for just 4 nights wasn’t worth it. Then I was tempted by Galaxy again: her planned refit has been cut short and extra cruises added at the beginning of the summer season, and I could have booked the same cruise as last year for about two-thirds of last year’s price. But I don’t have enough holiday for two long(ish) cruises in a year, so we couldn’t do that one. In the end I looked at the P&O brochure again, and spotted a four night mini-cruise on Oriana from Southampton to English Channel destinations (Rotterdam, Zeebrugge, and St Peterp Port, Guernsey), starting on 31 May. So this will give us a look at the more traditional aspect of P&O’s cruises. We’re looking forward to both of these cruises very much indeed, and the Oriana / Ventura comparison will be very interesting.
Postscript: We have now done both of our 2008 cruises, and enjoyed them very much. The second one – 12 nights on Ventura – was especially good, it’s the first time that we’ve done that length of cruise with a number of sea days. So our thinking now is that we may restrict ourselves to just one longer cruise each year and supplement that with shorter land-based ‘weekend away’ holidays through the year. Here’s a link to a page
