This post will cover our experience on the first sailing by a Princess Cruises ship out of the UK since that painful pandemic hit us all and locked down our ways of life. With this being a so-called Seacation cruise, and therefore not stopping at any ports, I’ll cover the entire trip in this single post as opposed to my usual day-by-day breakdown. I didn’t take anywhere near as many photos and videos as I might have done on a normal cruise because this wasn’t a normal cruise. Not only that, but with this cruise taking place aboard Regal Princess this was a familiar line for us, a familiar style of ship for us; this was like getting out of bed after a long time recuperating, putting on some comfortable slippers, and just saying Aaaah!

Embarkation

There was nothing normal about embarkation, and while the general process worked well enough – drive to the Covid testing centre, have your vaccination documentation checked, take a lateral flow test, drive to the terminal, wait for the test result to say you’re negative, get your Ocean Medallion, zip through security, and board the ship – that need for a pre-boarding test changed the feel of the cruise right from the start. We’re used to that terror before a cruise that comes from wondering if there will be a road closure that makes you late, or your alarm won’t go off, or your car won’t start, but once you do reach the port there are no more worries. Not the case here. Even after having your luggage taken away by the porters there’s still a chance you’ll get a notification to say nope, you’ve failed the test. That’s stress you don’t want. I get why the cruise lines are doing it – they’re trying to be super-careful in a world where every moron is looking to blame them for anything they can – but you can go to hotels, B&Bs, theme parks, gyms, stadiums, indoor events, pubs, restaurants, and more in the country without any testing at all. I’d really like to see the cruise lines drop this as quickly as possible.

Regal Princess Mini-Suite

We knew that the balconies on Regal Princess, as with all these Royal-class ships, were pretty dreadful, and there was no way to pick a specific cabin ahead of time, just the general type. As it would be just a few days at sea we opted for a Standard Balcony Cabin because there seemed no point in paying extra and not getting an improvement in the one part of the space we really liked. Prior to the cruise, though, we were notified that we’d been upgraded to a Deluxe Balcony Cabin, differing from a standard grade by the addition of a seating area. Okay, fine. But then we got a second upgrade to a Mini-Suite. This meant a larger bathroom as well; one with a bath. We didn’t use the bath on this cruise but it does make showering a lot easier and provides more room to dry wet swimming gear over.

And then the free gifts started turning up.

It began with a private message on Twitter from Princess’s UK media team asking for our room number (A336 if you’re interested) and the arrival soon after of two small bottles of sparkling wine with glasses. That was nice, and we had them on our balcony. That was followed in fairly swift order by two plates of nibbles, a bottle of white wine and a bottle of champagne, a box of chocolates, flowers, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. Wow! I know from posts on Twitter that a lot of people got gifted similar things, although they all seemed slightly different. There’s no disputing that it was a lovely gesture from the company.

Cocktails, Muster, Sailaway

First cocktails were taken by the pool area. Not our usual location for our first cocktails but the piazza area was busy and fairly noisy with people still boarding. My wife had been looking forward to a Dirty Banana for a long, long time. No comments, you. I asked the friendly face serving us at our table to recommend something for me and that’s how I ended up with a 24K Gold Margarita as my first cocktail back on board a cruise ship.

Muster was a different process, and soooo much better for it. We watched the safety video on the TV in our cabin – this registered us as having seen it – then went to our muster point (the casino), checked in there with our medallions, and received additional information from the member of staff there to complete the process. And that was that. Never change this. This is how I always want it to work.

We decided to grab a drink in Vines next. Vines was the one venue where the Ocean Medallion seemed to work best for us on this cruise (more on the Medallion later). We were simply asked what we’d like and that was that; no checking our names, no checking our cabin number; the staff simply knew. In fact, before we’d finished our glasses a member of the ship’s security staff walked straight up to our table asking if we could take our passports to reception to be scanned again as there’d been a problem with them. The ability of the staff to recognise us and know where we were was very good here. The issue with the passports was one we’d wondered about as the woman at the terminal hadn’t ever seen the new post-Brexit pieces of crap we now had to carry and seemed to take a long time to attempt to scan them, then simply resorted to typing in our details. At the front desk the man who took our passports away to photograph was similarly interested in seeing our new and less useful passports out in the wild for the first time.

Before we took the passports back to our room we wandered out onto the promenade deck for some air. It’s not a full wraparound promenade deck, but it does the job if you’re looking for some outside space. Obviously, dockside at Southampton doesn’t make for the most attractive of sights, but if it means you’re about to head off on a cruise then you don’t mind it too much.

We then made our way to our room so we could enjoy the sailaway from there. We’ve never been fond of the top deck and all its singing and dancing and waving of flags. What we did enjoy was not only being able to see the Spinnaker Tower in our home city of Portsmouth but also the next cruise ship we would be sailing on, Scarlet Lady, in Portsmouth Port, too. We hadn’t realised she was large enough to see from the Solent.

Crown Grill Speciality Dining

We’d booked dinner at the Crown Grill ahead of this Seacation cruise and it was to there that we headed on this first night back at sea. It’s always a rare filet mignon with the usual sides of mushrooms (for my wife), creamed spinach (for me), and fries (between us), with some dipping into different options for appetisers and desserts. Faultless food – Princess Cruises do this very well indeed – although the service was a bit haphazard, with our main course starting to be placed on the table before my wife had actually finished her hotter-than-the-surface-of-a-star soup. Teething issues with a lot of new staff, I’d like to think, and it didn’t spoil a lovely and recommended meal.

We finished up our evening with a bit of a chat and some drinks with Sandra and Chris of Brits On A Ship, and we shared some of our experiences (or issues) of using the Ocean Medallion aboard Regal Princess. Chris ended up with more drinks than he’d planned at one point as his first order had gone off for an explore around the ship without him. More on that at the end, though.

Trivia

The app that Princess would like you to use while on board encouraged people to book for things they’d like to do. But we don’t like to commit ourselves like that, and we weren’t sure what we’d want to do ahead of this cruise anyway, so we played the whole thing by ear on this Seacation. We hadn’t intended to go to the trivia that was taking place in the mornings in the Princess Live venue on the ship but as we’d finished breakfast in the buffet with plenty of time to spare we decided to chance being able to get in. This turned out to be no problem at all.

And then we won the trivia. We honestly thought we were doing terribly during the first part of it but we made some inspired guesses and took home a slew of prizes: a bag, a notebook, a coaster, and a wine-stopper; then a representative from the Effy store handed us a little gift bag with some small jewellery pieces and a pen. Our streak of winning at least one trivia aboard every single Princess cruise we’ve taken continues. It will come to an end one day, we know, but not this day.

Regal Princess Photographs

After dropping our prizes off in our room we decided to go for a bit of a wander around the ship. Having spent a week on her sister ship, Royal Princess, back in 2016 (see: Royal Princess, Europe 2016) there was nothing to really surprise us on Regal Princess.

On the top deck we decided to complete a circuit of it. This started off on the Skywalk viewing platform and took us past the main swimming pools towards the front of the cruise ship.

Forward of the main pools was the Retreat Pool, an adults only swimming pool in normal times, although they all were on this cruise thanks to everyone needing to be double-vaccinated. We would end up swimming in here on the final day of our time aboard Regal Princess. The pool was heated… a bit. It was more than good enough, though.

In addition to a (what we understand to be a very well-equipped) gym onboard there were also some outdoor spaces for those who like to exercise or play games: a walking and running track, some exercise frames, a court for basketball or similar sports, a miniature golf area, a golf driving net, table tennis tables, and shuffleboard areas are the ones I can recall. We don’t go in for that exercising lark, but each to their own.

Everyone loves an aft view on a cruise ship. There’s something about looking at the wake the ship is leaving on the sea’s surface that is just so calming. If I have to be critical of something then it is that the smoke being left by Regal Princess wasn’t great.

Moving inside and down many flights of staircases brought us to the heart of Regal Princess, the Piazza. Off from here, as you’ll no doubt be aware, are the shops, several bars, the International Café, and Alfredo’s Pizza. The bottom of the Piazza almost always had some form of live music, whether a pianist, violinist, or jazz trio. From this area you can also get to the casino and art gallery along with passenger services, future cruise booking, the photography studio, and the spa area.

Club 6 can be found on deck 6 and on a normal cruise it would be the late-night disco area. It’s no Skywalkers (night club on Grand-class ships). We didn’t check it out on this short Regal Princess Seacation because we were mostly bloated at the end of the evenings so disco dancing would have been a terrible idea even if they’d allowed it, but I don’t believe they did anyway.

Sabatini’s Speciality Dining

Our second day aboard Regal Princess included some more speciality dining in the evening at the Italian restaurant aboard. Knowing just how large those meals are we thought we might try to get away with no lunch at all, but after trying some interesting concoctions in the Good Spirits cocktail bar around midday we made the sensible decision to get a light bite to soak up some of that alcohol. We decided to use the Ocean Medallion app to order food to our table and I’m pleased to say it actually worked. Eventually. Well over half an hour from ordering to getting the food, and the bread of the tuna sandwich I chose was on the stale side, leading me to suspect it had been prepared too far ahead of my wife’s hot food. It served its purpose, though. We could have walked to the café which was a few metres from our seats in the bar but we wanted to test the app out. It’s something that will improve, I’ve no doubt.

A little later we discovered some chocolates delivered to our room (they’d stopped the nightly chocolates-on-pillow service for this cruise) and we hit Vines just before dinner because, well, it’s traditional, and we’re traditional people.

And so to Sabatini’s. If you like Italian food and you like getting value for money then this is one of the best bits of additional cash you can spend on a Princess Cruises cruise. Feedback I’ve provided to Princess in the past has included the recommendation that portion sizes are reduced to make the meal more special and less coma-inducing. That feedback seems to have been listened to because we found all the courses a little smaller – less bread, smaller and fewer tortelloni, improved and reduced sauces – and yet we still came away from the table absolutely stuffed to the gills.

Now, the food and service here wasn’t what we would consider Princess-standard. Most of the food was gorgeous but the dessert included a take on tiramisu that was offensive to the palate. Runny and rubbery would be two good adjectives to describe whatever that horror in the pot was. Our service from our staff member was as good as it could be but the problem was that it couldn’t be too good because he was absolutely run off his feet trying to cater for too large an area of tables on his own. He was flustered, sweating, doing his absolute best, and we could see that and account for it, but it spoke of problems with staffing levels that should have been communicated to guests. Indeed, a table near us had two guys dining on it who didn’t seem to understand that and loudly mentioned how disappointed they were by the whole experience. They didn’t receive their cutlery ahead of one course. Can you imagine how that could ruin your entire cruise? Anyway, the end result was that we decided not to ask for an end-of-meal limoncello and cocktail in order not to give our guy extra work to do, and that was possibly a good thing as we waddled away and got some fresh air on the promenade deck before working out what to do for the remainder of the evening.

After heading to the Vista Lounge for some entertainment, sitting there for ten minutes while the staff were taking orders from everywhere but where we were sitting (right near the front, in the middle), realising that because my wife had left her phone in the cabin we couldn’t actually order two drinks using the app on my phone alone without incurring additional charges (more on that later), and starting to get annoyed by the group of women near us who were getting a little too boisterous for our liking, we decided to head back to our room, risk the bottle of white wine we’d been given as a gift, and catch a movie on the TV instead.

Opening the wine involved calling our steward to come to our room with a corkscrew, have him turn up with a bottle opener instead and tell us they weren’t allowed to carry corkscrews, disappear off to take our bottle down to a bar to open, then return. Had we known then we’d have done it ourselves.

The movie we watched was Wonder Woman 1984 and my advice to you if you’ve not seen it is to continue to not see it for as long as you live.

Final Sea Day

Our morning on the final sea day aboard Regal Princess saw us return to the trivia in the Princess Live lounge after breakfast and win it again. We declined the offered prize as we’d won pretty much everything they had to give away the day before. The important thing was that we’d won.

We were distracted by dolphins for a bit from our balcony before taking the plunge and going for a swim in the lightly-heated Retreat Pool. It had been about two years since my wife had last had a swim – not so long for me as I solely braved the pool in Kos the year before – and it was lovely to get back in the water and spend half an hour swimming laps.

After our swim we entered full relaxation mode on our balcony with our books. There was enough sun at times to send us scurrying for sun cream. The balconies on Regal Princess, as mentioned, are not great. The depth of the balcony means you have to sit upright if you’re facing outwards to the sea, while the round table took up so much space that squeezing past it was annoying, and if you’d wanted to turn your chair sideways to use the foot stool then you could only do so by blocking off the doorway to the room. Despite that, we enjoyed being out on the balcony; we always do.

As the afternoon rolled around we headed towards the Piazza area for a drink first – in Bellini’s, where we had some fabulous service – and a bit of people-watching while we read, then walked the few metres across to Alfredo’s for some freshly-made pizza. Service here again was superb, and the food was just amazing, and especially so when you consider it’s included at no additional cost. We had a great seat by the window and followed up our fantastic pizzas with some proper tiramisu to try to take away the memory of the previous night.

A bit more reading and one more cocktail in Bellini’s finished up our afternoon.

Alfredo’s was very filling so we decided not to bother with any dinner, figuring if we needed to snack on something there’d be plenty of chances to do so. We took in some final sea views from our balcony before getting ready for some final evening drinking.

Crooners ended up being our pick for a last bit of fancy cocktails. Service here was all over the place, ranging from woefully inept (forty minutes for our first drink, with the first twenty just to be spotted by a member of staff) to absolutely perfect. We ended up finding out where Chris and Sandra were hiding and joined them for a couple more drinks right at the end too, before heading back to our room and placing an order for food and drink via the TVs while watching a bit of The Princess Bride for the gazillionth time.

Disembarkation And Cruise Conclusion

And so we returned to Southampton with some bright blue skies to greet us, had breakfast, and walked straight off the ship at our designated time of eight o’clock. Three quarters of an hour later we were home.

This cruise was just what we needed. It was great to be back at sea. It was fabulous to have some fine food and fancy cocktails. Having our first cruise back be with Princess Cruises, allowing us to reacquaint ourselves with the familiar rather than dive right in to something completely new, was a good call on our part.

But I have to make note of…

Ocean Medallion Issues On Regal Princess

The combination of technology and software limitations in the Ocean Medallion app created numerous problems and we ended up having to order most drinks with staff directly and telling them our cabin number. That defeated the point of the much-vaunted tech. And ordering with the staff wasn’t without issues either. We’re aware of rumours that the staff was short-handed in terms of experienced, trained members because of issues getting them into the UK, but those are just rumours and some honest communication from Princess if that was the case would have been useful in setting expectations.

The technology was problematic because the sensors that locate people weren’t accurate enough. Sometimes hilariously, badly so. We would have situations where the pair of us were sat at a table with one registered as in that bar (maybe) while the other was detected in a shop or, in one case, someone else’s cabin. Because you could only order food or drink to where the app on your phone thought you were or your cabin, this made ordering drinks impossible. Food could have been done because there was no charge but, despite a drinks package, there was a limit to ordering just one drink per person at a time otherwise you’d be charged. So, with my wife and I in a bar she ordered drinks for the pair of us and we got billed for one of them. When we tried to order drinks separately only one of us was registered in that bar so we couldn’t do that either. That failure to allow a person to order drinks for other people in their group also means that if Princess want people to use this tech then they also want everyone to carry their phone with them at all times. Not great for the evenings if you’re female and lacking trouser pockets, not wanting to carry a handbag, etc. as we discovered.

The app software also just listed the core drinks available, but individual bars would have their own menus that could be viewed by scanning a QR code. Viewed, yes, but ordered using the tech, no. This might be a design choice, to use the tech when somewhere else while relying on staff when in an actual bar, but that wasn’t the impression I got from all the promotional blurb.

The app itself was also horribly bloated, slow, and power-draining for phones, thanks to the animations for the daily planner in particular.

On the plus side, the door-unlocking as you approached your room worked well every time, even if the purported benefit of not needing to use your hands is a lie since the door handle still needs to be pushed down in order to enter your room.

I expect things are better in terms of location-tracking on the newer Princess ships as they have better sensor technology built-in rather than retro-fitted, but the apps needs work.

I have some app recommendations:

• Option to disable animations, or an expert mode to simply list planner activities without the fancy and slow overhead.
• Ability to pull up the menus of the bars through the app without having to use a QR code scanner. If the QR code on the table was supposed to be for health reasons and stop people touching menus then it didn’t work because the angle of the QR code made scanning without lifting up the Perspex block and tilting it tricky at best.
• Ability to set the delivery location without relying on where the app thinks you are. This is vitally important.
• Ability to order multiple drinks at once if there is more than one of you with the drinks package travelling together, and not be charged for it if you’re not over your daily allowance. This applies to ordering on the TV too. We had to order room service on two TVs at the same time in our room because of this. That’s a silly limitation.

I think those software changes aren’t difficult, and will go a long way to offsetting the technology constraints on ships built prior to the Medallion technology being fitted.

But those gripes aside, we had a lovely time back cruising, even if far too briefly, and we didn’t want to get off the ship.

Why am I mentioning this?

Well, it’s to do with why I don’t think anyone should ever be influenced one way or another from a single review of something without at least having some idea of the sort of person doing the reviewing. I know my family and friends, so in that respect I think I could happily recommend or argue against doing something, and they, knowing me, would know whether they trusted my opinion. But the internet is full of strangers. If you don’t know me very well then don’t simply trust what I’m about to say here; and don’t simply trust what someone who says the opposite for the same reason. Try not to fall into the trap of wanting to believe what someone has said because it aligns with what you already felt. I know that’s not easy. We are, sadly, all too human.

So, all of this is leading up to this point. I’m about to put down some short and quick (that’s a relative descriptive term which you’ll understand if you’ve read some of my travelogues on this site before) thoughts concerning our recently-disembarked cruise aboard the P&O cruise ship Iona. For context: we are a couple without children; we have cruised with P&O before (see the cruise menu) but we’d consider ourselves primarily Princess cruisers; we don’t tend to watch a lot of entertainment aboard ships; we like to try all the fancy drinks; we often book speciality dining; we often book excursions; we like quizzes. If you’re the sort of person who’s mainly cruised on car ferries, likes nothing more than bingo and watching music after a morning of yoga, and considers a vodka and tonic as pushing the boat out then there’s every chance that what I write here won’t entirely align with the sort of experience you might have were you to be on the same ship as me.

Right, enough preamble. There will be more in-depth accounts of our week on P&O’s Iona on the website in the near future, but here’s a list we maintained of the good and bad elements of the ship and the cruise line. This was a week aboard Iona, from and to Southampton, passing the Channel Islands and pottering about in the Bay of Biscay for a few days with no port stops.

Iona Pre-Cruise Covid Testing

BAD. This was not a good way to start the cruise and it could so very, very easily have been mitigated. I’m not talking about the need for the test; we’ve had two already on the two cruises prior to this; we’re fine (sort of) with the need for a test. We were given a 13:30 boarding time and we arrived at the right place at 13:20 because people who turn up too early should be shot into the sun. We were directed to a waiting lane where we waited. And waited. And waited. Iona was sailing on the same day as Regal Princess, and as both P&O and Princess are part of the Carnival group they used the same testing location. But Regal was sailing four hours earlier than Iona so it – rightly – got priority. It subsequently took us over three hours to get on the ship. Why were Iona’s tests not scheduled a few hours later to save everyone having to sit around in the sun in their cars on tarmac needlessly?

Iona Balcony Cabin

GOOD. We loved that the bathroom mirror didn’t fog up almost as much as we loved having a dim light on above the shower unit all night so that there was no need to switch the light on if getting up in darkness and risking waking the other half.

The size of the balcony, while not as big as the Grand-class ships of P&O and Princess that we love, was pretty good, and certainly better than the Royal-class ships and derivatives used by both fleets.

BAD. Narrow room. Very tight between end of the bed and the wall, but not as bad as between the side of the bed and the wardrobes. Not very practical.

Not having a mesh inner curtain was a minor additional issue when the sun was shining in as it pushed the ambient heat of the room up noticeably.

Promenade Deck

GOOD. A full wraparound deck is always nice and this one was wide with lots of loungers around and a handful of small tubs or pools. Of course, it had to have lots of loungers around but more on that when I talk about the top deck.

BAD. If you’ve gone for one of those Conservatory Suites on Iona deck 8 then be prepared to have your view be that of people walking past, bathing outside your room, or peering into your room. For us up on deck 12, though, the big problem with the promenade deck was that it was lit up at night, and brightly, and with nothing above it to block that light out. Do you like to sit on your balcony on a cruise ship at night, drink in hand, listening to the waves, watching the stars? We do. We could barely see a thing beyond the floodlit glare beaming up.

Dining On Iona

GOOD. There was good food to be had from the free – The Olive Grove and The Beach House – to the small additional surcharge – The Keel & Cow and The Glass House – and the Quays area, serving up complimentary fish and chips, some American diner food, and Asian fusion food too, was great.

While not exclusively dining, since it included a show, the Limelight Club was absolutely superb. We saw La Voix perform (brilliantly entertaining) and, of course, the resident band, the very excellent Limelights, and that was a faultless evening on Iona.

BAD. We got on the ship at 16:30ish and immediately booked dining through the website accessed through the ship’s Wi-Fi. Good for us, but for people arriving shortly after who we talked to later that day, it seems like we might have just squeezed in before all the bookings were filled. This system of giving those who board first priority booking is just awful. It discriminates against random boarding time assignments and those travelling some distance on the day of the cruise. There has to be a better way of ensuring all guests have equal chance to book at least something.

For the places with no pre-booking, the virtual queue system on the website worked in a fashion if you understand what it’s doing. For example, we wanted to eat at the Keel & Cow. We looked at the website. It wasn’t showing. To us that meant there was no queue so we walked up. Oh no. Not showing apparently meant it was full. I asked how you could tell the difference between “come on in” and “we’re all full” when it not appearing was the same result in both cases. No answer. There’s a simple UI fix here: list all the venues, all the time, with the number of people in the queue, including zero if necessary, or whether it’s presently full. That’s not difficult, surely?

We’ve dined at the Epicurean before (on Azura) and even though that hadn’t been fabulous it had been worthy of the term “speciality dining” and we still had some expectations that were not even close to being met on Iona. Service was glacial. I like relaxed dining but when you’ve been sitting at your table for one hour and ten minutes with just a hard roll, a watermelon shooter, and your starters consumed, then it’s too much. The food overall was barely above the standard of the main dining room, and certainly nowhere near the price point of the meal. But the venue was the worst. We were sat under what I think was an air conditioning unit. It thrummed and rumbled loudly for thirty seconds, sat silently for a minute, then repeated for the entire overly-drawn-out duration. “Can you just confirm to me what that noise is?” I asked a waitress. “Oh, that’s the loungers moving about on the deck above,” she lied.

The Iona Drinks Package

BAD. Yeah, there’s nothing good about this package, but please consider all the points I mentioned at the start of this post before you start thinking “Well, we thought it was great for drinking seven coffees and five pints of lager each day!”

Let’s start with the ridiculous need to add a sticker to the room card. You’ve got an integrated computer system. You don’t need a sticker, surely!? Anyway, P&O want that sticker. Fine. Here’s the thing, then. We arrive at our room. Our room cards are there waiting for us. We enter our room. There’s a letter telling us to take our cards up to a bar beside the Sky Dome to get a sticker. What!? Why didn’t you just put the sticker on the card? Why are you making passengers traipse through the ship to join a long queue to get a sticker? A first-time cruiser in the queue behind us was loudly moaning about this and she was absolutely right. And why aren’t the people who are checking room numbers and names off against their “Yes, these poor suckers bought this P&O drinks package” list being given a list in either alphabetical or numerical order? That pointless queue would move a lot faster if someone doesn’t need to flip through fifteen sheets of paper running his finger down the list each time.

It’s a week’s cruise, and you’re running at below capacity. What is your excuse, P&O, for not having some stock at all (happens every time) but, more importantly, running out of some things just a few days in? I suspect it’s shitty management and cost-cutting and, perhaps, Brexit, but there are so many right-wing twats in cruise circles you can’t possibly suggest that. Even worse than running out of things is when some of the things you run out of are part of the cocktails included in the drinks package, thereby making an already small list of options smaller. Included cocktails? Ah yes…

Our biggest issue with the drinks package on Iona was that this was the first time we’ve got one – our previous cruises weren’t long enough to qualify – and we immediately twigged once aboard that this was a huge mistake thanks to us misunderstanding some arguably deliberately misleading text on the P&O site.

“Nearly every drink we serve is included” and “Say ‘yes’ to an intriguing cocktail” led us to believe that we’d be able to try out lots of cocktails on Iona. We like cocktails. And the gins that you find in Anderson’s on a P&O ship. We were looking forward to them. Yeah, well that plan went tits up immediately. The “Ultimate Drinks Package” costs £40 a day for up to fifteen drinks, up to £7 a drink. How many cocktails does that include? Fuck all. Five maybe across the ship and in all bars, with typically two in any venue. And those gins in Andersons? Nope, because they’re set as double measures. Not only that, but you can’t even simply pay the difference in prices between a £7 and an £8 drink; you get treated to only paying 80% of the full price. Once you add that to what you’re already paying for the daily drinks package you suddenly realise, yeah, this is a complete rip-off and a means to scam passengers out of loads more money. We worked out for one of the drinks that if you had bought the package then it would only become cost-effective if you had 26 of them per day. You’re on the P&O ultimate drinks package and want a couple of coffees in the morning, a glass or two of the cheaper wines in the afternoon, another with dinner, then say, three non-inclusive cocktails in a lounge in the evening? Congratulations, because you’ve potentially just spent close to £60 today for that. So, as a result of buying the drinks package and not wanting to simply throw more money away we restricted ourselves to just the cheapest. Is that what P&O want? For guests to feel they have to restrict what they want? Is that why they ended up running out of certain ingredients? The drinks package is probably fine for beer and basic wine drinkers. It’s in no way at all ultimate. You like a fine wine, you like a cocktail, you like to try those gins? Yeah, avoid like the fucking plague would be my recommendation if I was into recommending things to people I don’t know.

Iona Top Deck And Swimming Pools

GOOD. The infinity pools looked nice.

BAD. There was very little deck space which is why, of course, the promenade deck had loads of spots for people to lounge outside upon. The space that there was, especially around those infinity pools, was rammed with loungers, barely any of which were free because pricks with towels and clothes pegs set alarms for these sorts of things then wander off for hours. I’m firmly of the opinion that 5 minutes is the total amount of time anyone should be allowed to “reserve” a spot if they’re not actually in the nearest pool.

Other than the small infinity pools there are two other pools up top. One is that near the the front of the ship and near the Retreat. Traditionally on P&O and Princess, this is the adults pool, the quiet one, the one for swimmers rather than noisy shits. Yeah, not a chance on Iona. That lack of space and the presence of a bar meant this area was also rammed when the sun was out and people wanted to enjoy it (the sun, not the unheated pool) but nobody could move at the aft area as all the limited floor space was filled. And this was on a reduced-capacity cruise. How the hell is this going to work at full capacity?

The other pool was in the Sky Dome. Ah yes. The spot on Iona designed after this conversation:

Should we have an indoor pool on Iona?

Sounds sensible. Nice pool. Glass roof. Lovely.

We could make the area circular so that we block off a far more massive area of the top deck than necessary and create a rounded eyesore.

Yeah, who could argue that wasn’t a good idea?

Oh, and here’s a thought…

Go on.

We can put on music performances in there.

So we can periodically close off the pool? I like it.

Yeah, and everyone likes a music performance in an enclosed space with rapidly rising heat levels and bad acoustics where it’s already horribly humid.

Perfection, mate.

Miscellaneous Good And Bad Iona Points

Yeah, told you that “short and quick” was a relative term. I’ll speed things up a bit to finish this off.

GOOD.

• Quiz Passport. We loved this. If you win a trivia game (and possibly other types too; we never found out) then you receive stamps in a passport book that you can redeem for prizes at the end of the cruise. This means the days of multiple keychains or tote bags are gone if you’re smart enough. We’d never won a trivia game on a P&O ship before and somehow managed to win four – two of them on tiebreakers – which meant we got a glass tumbler with P&O Cruises on it. Fabulous.
• Automatic Doors. Who doesn’t like approaching a door and waving their hand mystically in front of it to make it open?
• Style. Iona is a new ship and she’s very stylish. The atrium was bright and airy. The general decor was lovely. Sindhu was absolutely stunning-looking.
• Entertainment. I’ve said we don’t do entertainment typically but we caught some accidentally and, with the exception of a comedian whose material should’ve been destroyed by the same impact event that wiped out the dinosaurs, it was good stuff. La Voix and the Limelights in the Limelight Club were superb, there were some decent singers, acrobatic bits in the atrium, some pleasant sea shanties, and for the second cruise in a row we were treated to close-up magic at our table, and even took a souvenir from the occasion. I saw Sue Holderness give a talk that was quite enjoyable too.

BAD.

• Food Quality. Generally, it was just not what we’re used to. It wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t feel as good as it’s been on other ships, P&O or otherwise. And the range of food was small, too. Breakfast, for instance offered very little, if any, variety. There is only so much mileage you can get out of that “Well, Covid, you know” excuse. The steaks in the Keel & Cow and at the Epicurean were… meh. They were cooked how I wanted but the meat was tougher than I’d expected and lacking a little flavour.
• Internet. Pointless to get, but we’d heard that before boarding. One of the staff members told us that she could only talk to her family at home when they got to port. It’s difficult to guess why this was the case on such a new ship.
• Service. Unpredictable would be the word here. Sometimes it was perfect, mostly it was okay, but you tend to remember when it’s bad and that’s the case here. I’ve already mentioned how slow it was in the Epicurean but we had poor service in Brodie‘s (another couple had to wander up to the bar to get someone to come around to our part of the bar), slow service in the main dining room for lunch, and some abysmal service on the last night in the Club House. I’d estimate there were two dozen people in there, including us, and about one member of staff per table if we’d wanted it so you wouldn’t think there would be a problem getting someone to take your drinks order, but if the DJ reads this then I’m the guy who walked up to his booth past midnight, held up my phone with its running timer on it, and put in a request for “A drink” by “Anyone” that sent him scurrying to the bar. 24 minutes we waited, in a near-empty, well-staffed lounge, and I didn’t even start that timer until we’d been sat there for four or five before that.
• My Holiday “App”. It’s not an app; it’s a website. Anyway, it’s not awful, but it’s lacking some refinement and improvements. List all the dining venues with status and queue would be good. Make the food and drinks menus and daily programme available as PDFs. Those are two simple changes that would help a lot.

Iona Cruise Conclusion

As I’ve said, there will be more detailed write-ups to come, and hundreds of photos and videos, but our thoughts about this ship soon after getting off are that we won’t be looking to book anything else on her. Of course I’m listing bad points more than good because I wanted to like Iona and I wanted to have a great time, but I just didn’t. I know other people did, but they may have had lower expectations and a crappier cruise history (because ours has been awesome) to compare against. These issues – drinks package aside – are all minor when taken separately, but they added up to disappointment. Some of these things may never happen again (shit happens, you know); some may simply be things other people expect or accept and subsequently don’t care about.

This was the first cruise we’ve ever had where that last evening came around and those letters appeared letting us know when we could disembark and we weren’t sitting there thinking “No, I don’t want to get off.” We were totally indifferent to it, and probably mostly because we know we’ve got Sky Princess coming up in a few weeks where we’re anticipating a far better time will be had.

We didn’t have a terrible cruise. Somebody had to be evacuated by helicopter off the French coast, and two ambulances pulled up alongside the ship after we’d docked. Those people had terrible cruises. We were two adults, lucky to live in a place where we could get out to sea for a week, who enjoyed spotting whales and dolphins and bats, ate, drank, read, were entertained, and took part in and won quizzes. We had a good time. We just didn’t have as good a time as we’d hoped.

There are cruise bloggers who are obsessed with the ships or certain lines – lots of them; in fact, most of the ones we know, I think – but we’re primarily itinerary and price-driven (Virgin Voyages are a big exception to the rule here; that’s all about the experience). We would never rule out a ship based on our own experiences or from any reviews we’ve read but Iona is a long way down any list of future possibilities. As for P&O: we have another cruise due with them in a couple of months (Ventura to the Canaries) and we won’t be getting the drinks package so are hopeful for a return to the standard we’ve come to expect.

It is no secret that when Scarlet Lady was first revealed to the world – well, to the invited hordes of the media and bloggers and influencers and beautiful people – we were far from enamoured with what we saw. That’s an understatement. The ship looked too different, had some bizarre design choices, looked like it was marketed towards a very small demographic, was too expensive, and so on. We were not looking to book a cruise on her then or, probably, ever. But then the world fell apart for a while – it’s still not back together, of course – and plans were put on hold and changed, and schedules were shifted, and all of a sudden Virgin announced they would start Scarlet Lady’s delayed maiden season with a few port-free sailings from the UK – further along the vaccinating people roadmap than the viral cesspit that is Miami – and not just anywhere in the UK, but Portsmouth. Or, as we like to call it, home. In fact, we can walk to the port from our front door in about ten minutes.

And that’s the story behind us booking three nights on a Scarlet Lady cruise. Convenience, of course, but general nosiness too to see what she’d be like with a necessarily older demographic than originally intended (based on vaccination roll-out schedules), and then there was the significant incentive of “sailor loot” that would come with different grades of rooms. We were always going to book a balcony because anything less simply isn’t us, but once we looked at some of the perks with what Virgin call their “Rock Star” (or “Rockstar“; I’ve seen it written both ways) cabins, along with the generous on board credit, we realised we could pay a little more and get a lot more. We ultimately selected the lowest grade of these cabins, what’s known as a Seriously Suite cabin, and the port side in order to enjoy the harbour views as we left Portsmouth. This would end up being an excellent decision.

Pre-Cruise Covid Testing

We were on the third of the regular maiden season cruises and there had been issues with the first of those where pre-cruise Covid-testing was concerned, but I’m happy to say that we experienced no problems at all. Arriving by car at the Park & Ride about an hour before embarkation time as instructed, we were directed immediately to the test centre on the other side of the M275 motorway, joined a short queue, got tested, got the results, were handed our wearable tech, and were sent on our way with very little delay. Back home to drop the car off, pick up the cases, then walk through to the port, check in, hop on a bus, and get onto the ship. Start-to-finish was about an hour and a quarter which meant we were in our room about fifteen minutes after our scheduled boarding time.

And what a room!

Scarlet Lady Seriously Suite 12219A

Other than requiring a balcony, we generally consider a room to be a room and aren’t typically fussed too much about what’s in there and what it looks like so long as it’s functional and not too cramped. For us, it’s usually more about placement of the room on the ship than anything else. However, forget all that, because we instantly fell in love with this Seriously Suite grade of room on Scarlet Lady. We had a wow! moment when we first experienced a balcony room on a cruise back in 2013, and we had another wow! moment when we stepped inside room 12219A.

Stylish! Well, you can tell that from the pictures immediately. Spacious! No scuttling sideways down the side or ends of the bed here! Plenty of storage space, and in proper wardrobes too, unlike lower grade rooms. And the eye-catching extras like the bar and the turntable, both of which we’d make use of.

But, utterly bizarrely, the bathroom was the star of the room. Huge, spacious, bright, and marble-covered, but that walk-in shower was jaw-droppingly fantastic. You could lay down and shower. We didn’t, but we could have. I might on the next cruise, though, now that I’ve mentioned it, because partly on the strength of this room on Scarlet Lady we’ve already booked a similar, follow-up cruise on her sister ship, Valiant Lady, for 2022, and in the same suite because we’ve checked the plans for higher grade rooms and they don’t look as good to us. There’s a room type for everyone on a cruise ship and it turns out that the Seriously Suite is our type of room.

I’ll cover things like the entertainment in the room and our playing around with the drinks and record player in the follow-up post in this travelogue series, but for now here’s a short video from inside our Seriously Suite cabin showing off the space in the bedroom and bathroom, as well as the outside space of the balcony along with its hammock that we initially considered to be a gimmick, but really rather enjoyed as well.

There was a video here, but now there isn’t.

The Seriously Suite cabin on Scarlet Lady was very nearly perfect. If I could make a couple of minor changes then they would simply be maybe a way to block off the peep window between the bathroom and bedroom and/or some form of low-level lighting in the bathroom at night. The window, while fantastic-looking and unique, means an uninterrupted night’s sleep isn’t guaranteed if your partner needs to use the toilet during it and pitch blackness isn’t possible.

Top Deck And Richard’s Rooftop

You’ve got to go exploring as soon as possible – after we’d watched the muster drill video in our room and confirmed attendance for that on the tablet – and so we headed straight up to the top to enjoy a little bit of Portsmouth in the sunshine and see for ourselves what that infamous swimming pool looked like.

We’d seen pictures of the swimming pool when Scarlet Lady had been thrown open to the PR masses, we’d heard people’s complaints about it, and we’d taken a look at the deck plans too, so we roughly knew what to expect. In truth, the pool looked okay, size-wise, for people to gather about socially thanks to the shallow lozenge of water around its main part, and it was actually a little bigger than we’d assumed. But, for us, it was not a pool we could use in any practical sense. And it was surprising, in a way, that a cruise line like Virgin Voyages would make such a big deal about health and fitness, but then provide no place where people who like to actually swim could do so. I’d love to see a lap pool – preferably one with pretty much no loungers around so that it was just for swimmers – make an appearance on later ship designs if possible, because being able to get in a pool and swim while at sea is one of those things we absolutely love.

One of those perks of being a Rock Star Sailor on a Virgin Voyages cruise ship is having access to an area called Richard’s Rooftop. A card in our room allowed us to swipe to enter a closed-off section at the front of the top deck. This brought us into a space filled with various forms of seating, hot tubs, and even trampolines. One thing to mention about Scarlet Lady is that when it comes to seating, there is no end of choice. Even though we sailed well under capacity, I’m sure you’d always be able to find a spot to sit in around the open decks even with a fully-laden ship.

We had good intentions. We had planned to scoot around the top of the ship, getting a feel for things, taking a few photos; then scoot around the main decks, get an idea where things were, take a few photos. Sadly for us, the barman at the bar in Richard’s Rooftop asked us if we wanted a drink and we ended up saying yes because it was a drink and we were us and we were on holiday. So that’s why this first day aboard Scarlet Lady and the explore before sail-away more-or-less came to a screeching halt.

Lunch And Drinks Aboard Scarlet Lady

After our cocktails on the top deck had been supplemented with a complimentary glass of fizz we reached the time when we needed to check-in in person at our muster station. With that necessary task out of the way we thought we might take more of a look around the inside of Scarlet Lady but that plan lasted just as long as it took us to reach the Dock House where another friendly barman guilted us into asking him for a drink.

You pay for drinks on Scarlet Lady, but all the food is free (with one exception, covered in the next post), and thus it was that we did something terribly sensible and had some small bites for lunch as well.

As an aside here, the food and drinks on Scarlet Lady were of extremely high quality, with a fabulous range too. The only area where things could really be improved is in perhaps catering to more of the conventional drinking tastes; some classic cocktails, staples of many cruises, simply couldn’t be made thanks to a lack of the right mixers or ingredients. This wasn’t a problem for us as we love to make our way through all the fancy and new things on a menu, but we knew some people aboard missed certain drinks they preferred and would typically expect to find on a ship. A Virgin Voyages ship is anything but typical, of course, but it would be nice to provide that option, especially with cruises of longer durations.

We had time to check out the Draught Haus Tap Room before the ship left the port, and by “check out” I mean “grab a couple of drinks”, but you knew that already. Beer on tap on ships is a wonderful thing and long may it continue.

Scarlet Lady Departing Portsmouth Harbour

The remainder of this first post from our Scarlet Lady cruise travelogue series covers the sail out from our home city as seen from our Seriously Suite cabin balcony.

We’ve cruised into and out of many ports during our years of cruising, but many of them, while great because of what they signify – you’re on a motherflipping cruise! -, are much of a muchness. There are exceptions, especially for those who like commanding landscapes (Ushuaia and Kotor are incredible), but if you’re a fan of history or the navy or naval history then overlook my natural bias while I say that you’ll find it hard to beat Portsmouth.

The offshore patrol vessel in the photo below (P233) and her sister ship a few photos after that (P234), both in their distinctive dazzle camouflage, are the HMS Tamar and HMS Spey, respectively. They are the first vessels to be decorated in that style since World War II. It was nice to have that connection with dazzle camouflage on Scarlet Lady, too, as she sports a restaurant called Razzle Dazzle, named for the naval style.

The ship between the two patrol vessels (D35) with the equally distinctive motif of a red dragon on her bow is the appropriately named HMS Dragon. She is a Type 45 destroyer and is the only ship in the Royal Navy with that design on her.

HMS Prince of Wales (R09) is one of two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers in operational service of the Royal Navy. It’s always fun to hear people exclaim how large an aircraft carrier is, but then you sail past on a cruise ship and completely dwarf it.

In the photo below you’ve got two of Portsmouth’s most famous historical ships. Sadly lacking her full masts is HMS Victory on the right while to the left, hidden inside the shell of a downed flying saucer (maybe), lies the remains of The Mary Rose. Both are fabulous to see, and if you’re ever visiting Portsmouth then try to book tickets for the dockyard to have a look around the pair of them.

Scarlet Lady next cruised past two very prominent sights that you can’t fail to miss if you’re in the Gunwharf area of Portsmouth. The Spinnaker Tower, naturally, can be seen from miles around. Not quite as sky-reaching but equally gorgeous along the waterfront is the museum ship, HMS Warrior, the first armour-plated, iron-hulled, steam-powered frigate.

In the photographs below you can also see a building with a monochrome Union Flag on it. That is the Ineos Team UK building, from which Britain’s attempt to win the Americas Cup under Ben Ainslie has been based.

That brought us out of Portsmouth Harbour entrance and with it some fantastic views of the low, warm, evening sunshine lighting up parts of the old defences along the seafront. If you’d like to read a little more about the fortifications here – the Round Tower, the Square Tower, the Hot Walls – then a little bit of history is covered here: Old Portsmouth Shoreline Photowalk.

Another wonderful sight as Scarlet Lady completed her departure from Portsmouth was seeing the hovercraft to the Isle of Wight take off from Southsea as soon as we’d passed. There aren’t many great reasons to visit the Isle of Wight but if you’ve no need to take your car across on the ferry then a hovercraft ride can’t be beat for loud, fast fun.

That completes this first post of our Scarlet Lady travelogue series, covering our Seriously Suite cabin, a few drinks and photos here and there, and a gorgeous sail out from Portsmouth Port.

In the next post I’ll go through the dining during our weekender cruise as well as the bits of entertainment we caught. We could barely do one tenth of the things we wanted to do with this cruise being so short and everything about the Virgin Voyages experience being excitingly fresh and there being an abundance of choices to make. Hopefully, we’ll be able to address some of that on our next trip with the cruise line in March.

In this post I’ll cover what we got up to on our first night aboard Scarlet Lady. If you’ve read travelogues elsewhere on this site or if you’ve met us in real life or if you’ve parsed the title of this post using your expert comprehension of English then you’ve probably guessed that the words “food” and “drink” will feature heavily. You would be absolutely right.

Scarlet Lady Test Kitchen

Virgin do things a little differently from most cruise lines, and certainly a lot different to all the cruise lines with whom we’ve sailed over the years. The idea of one or more main dining rooms has been made to walk the plank and sent to a watery grave, replaced instead by smaller, more specialised restaurants. This transforms the cruise experience on Scarlet Lady into one of regular speciality dining nights, but with no additional cost for the food. Those restaurants on the cruise ship can be broadly grouped into two types: themed and experiential. Both types feature a limited menu range, although the themed restaurants will have more choices. This simplifies what the kitchens aboard need to stock and what the chefs aboard need to know how to cook, but it also means they can do this cooking very well.

Prior to the cruise we were able to make bookings for restaurants, but only the experiential ones. In order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to try the food they like you’re only allowed to book once per location initially with the possibility of more spaces becoming available once you’re aboard and a wait-list of some description comes into play. Very sensible, and we liked this approach a lot. The only experiential restaurant we wanted to try for this taster cruise was The Test Kitchen and we booked it for the first night on Scarlet Lady.

Of course, we didn’t go straight to dinner. Animals go straight to dinner without a drink first, and we’re not animals. We made our way to On The Rocks for a couple of cocktails.

How to describe the Test Kitchen as a dining experience? Well, you know those intimate, candle-lit locations, ideal for dining for two, the quiet murmur of low conversations across the table from one another? This was like not that. If you’ve got working eyeballs then you can see from the photos below anyway, but think of it as part modern laboratory, part we’ve-moved-all-the-seats-into-the-restaurant-kitchen. Bright. Very bright. Very clean. Rather noisy. Different. Different is what Virgin do a lot of.

Food options here were limited to either vegetarian or non-vegetarian, with the latter adding a further one-course option switch between beef and venison. It was always going to be venison for the pair of us. In addition, there was an option to pay for either a wine or cocktail pairing alongside each course. Not being fans of white wine and knowing how much these pairing menus love to slip those in, and since we’d been on the cocktails already, we opted for the latter. This was $35 per person and included six small cocktails.

First up was a mushroom-shaped paté. I’m not a fan of mushroom (that’s an understatement) and it’s more a texture thing than taste (although quite why anyone likes the taste of soggy cardboard left in the ground is another thing altogether), but when it comes to fancy restaurants I will tend to give the chefs the benefit of the doubt that they know what they’re doing. This was lovely. The same can’t be said for the accompanying cocktail which bore all the flavour of fizzy water, but I’m pleased to say that the cocktails did improve from this low point as the courses proceeded. As to whether the cocktails truly paired with the courses: I’m not so sure. Then again: who cares? They’re cocktails!

Arriving under a smoky cloche was the next course, called “Egg”. I think you can see why.

Seafood is something I’m not a fan of. Fish, I like, but once you hit molluscs and arthropods in the animal kingdom then it’s pretty much a big no from me. However, again, when in a speciality dining establishment, do what the speciality dining establishmentarians do. I’m assured by my wife that the scallops were lovely. I ate them.

The main course of venison then arrived with a layered potato side dish. Now we’re talking! This was all absolutely top stuff. The quality of the meat, the combination of flavours with the sauces, and the presentation were far beyond pretty much any meal we’ve had at sea, and ran some snazzy land-based restaurants close too. And, of course, potato: I’m half-Irish and you can’t go wrong with serving me potato. It triggers my happiness hormones.

From the utterly delectable to the borderline gag-inducing with the next course of blue cheese. I don’t like cheese. Again, it’s a texture thing usually, because I can handle melted cheese but nothing hard. Food with the consistency of erasers on the ends of pencils is a red flag from nature. The taste is mostly irrelevant because I’ll only ever have it with other things that actually have a flavour I like. The same cannot be said for blue cheese, though. I can tell from the look and smell of blue cheese that no, no thank you, no thank you at all is the only answer when it comes to that. The blue cheese course at the Test Kitchen was shaped like a caterpillar for some reason. The taste was indescribably bad to me. The texture was right at the limit of my coping powers. I did, however, soldier through this revolting lump of putrescence. To give balance to this review of this particular course of the meal, both my wife – a huge fan of all types of cheese – and the couple next to us – apparently also cheese people – all agreed it was not pleasant either. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t like it. You might be a complete weirdo. You’re reading this and that gets you weirdo points already.

Anyway, we all ate it. Just.

So, finally, the dessert course, and how could it be anything other than chocolate? Everyone, thankfully, loves chocolate, and this was an excellent finish to the meal, with a nice mix of textures again.

Is the Test Kitchen worth a booking on Scarlet Lady? Of course! It’s free, and there are other places to eat around the ship if you don’t like what you’re served. You’re on a cruise. You can eat pretty much non-stop, so why wouldn’t you try this? We loved the aspect of thinking “Yeah, we’re not in the main dining room of a cruise ship” here, it was great to watch the chefs preparing the courses, and the quality of the food – even if not everything suits every individual’s palate – couldn’t be faulted. You don’t know until you try, though.

To round off and make our evening at the Test Kitchen on Scarlet Lady even better was the company we had on our section of bench in the restaurant. We were lucky enough to be seated beside Lieutenant Commander Natalie and her mum, Kim. The Lieutenant Commander should have been on this weekender cruise with her husband but he’d been called up to head out to Afghanistan at short notice, much to the absolute joy of Kim who then got to take his place on this trip. The other thing that Kim enjoyed was that her daughter outranked her son-in-law. We all talked for ages, comparing how we felt about the dishes in the restaurant, talking about other cruises – well, that’s an unwritten law of all dinner conversations on cruise ships, after all -, and numerous other topics too, and talked so long that by the time we decided we ought to give the staff a chance to clean our area of the restaurant there were probably only half a dozen other people still in there. A good night at the Test Kitchen would be the conclusion here.

Late Night On Scarlet Lady

The good thing about the meal we’d just had, with its many but perfectly-sized courses, followed by the long conversation with people we’d just met, was that when we left we weren’t bloated. We’re used to speciality dining on cruises ensuring you feel like you’ve had value for money, and because cruising is a very American-oriented thing “value for money” is typically synonymous with “quantity, quantity, quantity”. We’d much prefer fine dining that feels like it’s special and that’s what we experienced on Scarlet Lady throughout this cruise.

So, we weren’t full, and we were on a fancy ship, and it was late, and we’d been drinking cocktails since the early afternoon. What are a couple to do? Head to a bar. A quick stroll brought us to the Sip Lounge and we picked a couple of drinks from the menu there while watching the odd person or two wander through. In truth, it was a bit quieter than we’d expected, even allowing for the reduced capacity cruise numbers. We’d anticipated more people up and about into the early hours.

Seeking something more engaging, we headed off towards the aft of the ship and stumbled into the Arcade. This was heaven. For people of a certain age – and we’re people of a certain age – this was noisy neon nostalgia. We were here ages, playing most of the games, playing them really badly, listening to loads of 1980s pop music, and having a fabulous time.

Finally sated of video arcade entertainment for this first night, we continued aft, through the Dock House (where we grabbed ourselves another cocktail each; maritime law, and all that) and then outside to drink under the stars. And not just under the stars, as we spotted a couple of Perseid meteors burning up in the night sky too.

By the time we headed back inside we found the bars had closed, but we knew that Scarlet Lady’s nightclub, The Manor, was still an option. We negotiated the mirrored walk to the interior and survived about ten minutes before the type of music being played persuaded us that there was a better option if we wanted a nightcap. Thus it was – after missing the exit and ending up on the upper level of the club initially; seriously, those mirrors and late-night drinking are not a great combination – that we made our way back to our room and its free bar, there to enjoy a bourbon on the balcony before bed.

In the third part of this Scarlet Lady cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the next day at sea on this Virgin Voyages ship. It would be a day recovering from a hangover (for some reason), one that includes dining at the Italian restaurant on the ship, and concluding with the line’s signature Scarlet Night.

For some inexplicable reason, despite not heading to bed until the third hour after midnight, we were up bright and early. To clarify: the weather was bright. We were not bright. We were somewhat zombie-like. We decided not to go for brains, but had some breakfast anyway then thought a bit of a walk on the open decks and some sea air might do us the world of good. Or kill us.

The early hour lent Scarlet Lady a little bit of a ghost ship feel. We are not nature’s early risers on cruises – there’s usually something so soothing about the gentle rocking motion and the odd creak of metal as ships cut through the waves gently overnight that we’re quickly pushed into pleasing comas – so witnessing a ship with so few people around until bright sunshine was unusual. The only time that typically happens for us is when we cruise in Asia and our body clock is so out of sync with the local time zone. Cruising off the coast of England? Unheard of! Maybe we were still buzzing with excitement at how this ship was making us feel. Maybe it’s just another symptom of old age.

You’ll see from some of the photos here the wide variety of and large number of seating options on Scarlet Lady. While everything seemed a little lower than we’d really have liked – we’ve got knees to think about – we can overlook that a little as we realise we’re not precisely Virgin’s target demographic. The range and number of seats, though, we loved. Even though it was sailing at nowhere near capacity on this cruise we generally thought that you’d not struggle to find somewhere to sit or lie down even if it was.

But, while we may not be as young (or wealthy, or healthy-minded) as Virgin seem to aim at, we do still have a streak of the young-at-heart about us, and so, even with raging hangovers, we tried out the swing chairs and the see-saws and played table football. And really enjoyed it all. We’re pretty introverted normally so that lack of anyone else around probably helped here too.

One thing I didn’t enjoy as much – and given how much we like art in general, and love modern and abstract works – was the artwork that Virgin selected to showcase on their ship. You could see examples of this outside the elevators where a wall was decorated in the same style with a single piece accented to indicate the floor, but there were some pieces on the top deck too, one of which is shown below. I like minimalism, I like modernism, I like the bubbly feel of late 1960s and early 1970s art, and so there’s no reason I shouldn’t like this. But I don’t. It’s pretty dull, really. For a generally flashy, highly stylish ship as Scarlet Lady, this felt basic and cartoonish. But it’s art. And we all react differently to it. I don’t doubt that there will be some people who “absolutely love” it, and perhaps genuinely so and not just because they want to come across as super-positive for reviews. Oh me! I’m such a cynic.

We weren’t the only people awake, of course. You’ll always find those achingly desperate to stake out their spots around the swimming pool (or XL-size bathtub on Scarlet Lady) even when they’ve got absolutely no intention of using it (the selfish bastards) and those utterly bizarre folk who have to start a day with a jog on a treadmill.

The mid-morning and early-afternoon parts of this sea day aboard Scarlet Lady were a blur of quiet moaning – it helps the body process alcohol – and reading and relaxing on our balcony, and perhaps an hour’s snooze, but we reached a point where we thought we might risk a hair-of-the-dog so made our way to the Draught Haus for a beer each. This didn’t go down as well as we’d hoped, and resulted in us nursing our pints for the best part of ninety minutes.

However, what was nice was that we got to experience some of Virgin’s pop-up entertainment that we’d heard about. This was in the form of some close-up magic from Andy, one of the many entertainment staff aboard whose remit is broader and more individualistic than you’d typically find on another cruise line where everything is managed by one cruise director. The tricks were good, we couldn’t see the sleight-of-hand nor work out how all the backs of the cards changed pattern, and Andy was nice enough to create a fancy fan-shape and pose for a photo too. You can also see from this photo just how casual the general look of the crew on Scarlet Lady was, although it’s worth noting that there was never any problem with identifying one from a fellow passenger.

Another lovely element to the close-up magic was that it reminded us of our very first cruise – and we chatted to Andy about this after his tricks – when we’d also seen some close-up magic. That had been on Diamond Princess, off China, in the atrium, with my wife and I sat with the magician under the watchful gaze of tens of dozens of people on the staircases and levels looking down. We liked this quiet, more personal approach more (that introverted thing again), and we loved that we got to reminisce about that first cruise. There were a number of times on this weekender cruise that we felt like that. Virgin did a spectacular job of making everything feel fresh and exciting.

We’d struggled with our beers so we hit our balcony again for the rest of the afternoon, and we decided to drink water. Water. Us. Anyway, sunshine, drinks, books, the sight and sounds of the sea, and the best company: it’s what cruising is all about.

Scarlet Lady’s Extra Virgin Restaurant

Scarlet Lady may have some fancier dining establishments but it also caters to some more general and widespread tastes, and Extra Virgin is her take on an Italian restaurant, the place we’d booked for this evening’s meal. We’re big fans of Italian food. It’s often our first choice if we’re holidaying in the UK, and we’ll nearly always book into the Italian speciality restaurant, Sabatini’s, if we’re on a Princess ship, so we felt it made sense to see how it compared.

The first thing to mention, of course, is that there’s no cost for the food; like almost all the food on a Virgin cruise ship, it’s included in the price. The restaurant had its own character and was stylish, modern, but not typically Italian in appearance. No problem there, though. The quality of the food in Extra Virgin couldn’t be faulted, and for our tastes there were probably more options in food choices that we could pick from when compared to Princess, but I think we both felt that we still preferred Princess – not by much – over Virgin here. One element we really did enjoy, though, was the build-your-own approach to the affogato; we had a lot of fun interacting with our server to choose the precise types of ice cream and accompaniments to that. We would be extremely happy to eat at Extra Virgin again.

My wife went for the Braised Mini Meatballs followed by the Oxtail Agnolotti, while I picked Smoked Chicken Liver Mousse with Potato Gnocchi as the main course.

At the conclusion of our lovely meal in Extra Virgin we headed to the hub of the ship and discovered, for the first time, that the vinyl store was open. This gave me a chance to peruse and pick up something. Upon returning it to our cabin we discovered that we’d also been left with a gift of a couple of Virgin bags. We’re used to getting these on Princess cruises so it was nice to see them appear on Scarlet Lady too, and they were very nice, very good quality too.

As the sun was dipping towards the horizon and we had a perfect view of it from our balcony we thought we’d enjoy some of it with another drink from the bar. How terribly civilised.

A Splash Of Scarlet Night

This was the night that Virgin called their Splash of Scarlet night. There had been some encouragement for people to add some red to their clothing for the evening and I’d donned a rather appallingly bright Hawaiian-style shirt for our meal – and got an “Oh, that looks lovely” from one of the crew that might even have been genuine and not patronising in the slightest – but decided to ditch it in favour of something that felt more comfortable after we’d returned to the room, mostly because there were hardly any other people doing so. However, just because not that many passengers were in red, the same couldn’t be said for the ship which attracted some mood lighting for the occasion in various locations. We soon found ourselves in the Dock House where we had the chance to sample a few more of our favourite cocktail there, the Fig Sour, and do a bit of people-watching.

And for the second time that day we were treated to some more pop-up entertainment. This time it came in the form of a couple performing folk songs and shanties, later to be followed along by a high-energy dance quartet who reminded us that there would be a pool party on the top deck later in the evening. We had already known about the pool party but those sorts of things don’t appeal to us as much as they do to others so we contented ourselves with something a little more relaxed, even if it meant we’d miss the giant octopus and light show. Maybe we’ll see what it’s like on our next Virgin cruise.

We ended up spending the rest of the evening back in the Draught Haus once more after wandering through to see if there was anything else to see entertainments-wise, spotting some cruise-blogging friends, and joining them for some drinks. We also spotted some existing (and made some new) cruise-blogging enemies, but I don’t want to spoil the overall positive feel of this post so perhaps that’s a tale for another time. You can tell we were still feeling the after-effects of the evening before because we decided to try the bar’s “Shot Tails” in order to keep the volume of alcohol down to a sensible limit.

The evening finished up back in our room (always the best place to find yourself) and one more treat from this Splash of Scarlet night on Scarlet Lady as we discovered that the balconies were also all lit up in red. Coupled with the thick fog we were cruising through this made for a uniquely atmospheric experience. We had a quick drink on the balcony with the door open, listening to the Jurassic 5 album I’d bought earlier. A very nice way to end off a very relaxing day.

In the next post in this Scarlet Lady weekender cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the final full day aboard Scarlet Lady. Another dining venue to try out, some afternoon tea as well, and a lot of video footage taken for a change.

• That Day We Had Afternoon Tea On Scarlet Lady
• Scarlet Lady Cruise: Memories Of When I Didn’t Take Many Photos
• Scarlet Lady Day 3: The Third Day

… and the responses were not positive.

The lack of potentially compelling titles is an artefact of us not really doing anything that different on this day at sea. You might think that with such a long lay-off from cruising due to the pandemic we’d be keen to do everything going. You might think that this would especially be the case on such a different ship as Scarlet Lady. Perhaps, with hindsight, we should have been a bit more outgoing, adventurous, seeing what was going on, but that’s not really who we are or why we generally cruise. We’ve always been about the destination and exploring ports, with the luxury and convenience and sense of motion that comes from being on a cruise ship very much secondary benefits; albeit great ones that make us favour holidays at sea over those on land. These “seacation” cruises coming out of lockdown took away that main driver for us and we slipped easily into the “inbetween ports” mode of travel once more, content to mostly read, drink, eat, and just relax. Just relaxing is great for your physical and mental wellbeing, but facilitating the generation of snappy post titles about cruises on luxury ships… not so much.

We intend to try out a few more things when we cruise again with Virgin in 2022 on Valiant Lady, now that we have more of an idea about what the cruise line does and what it offers. Perhaps there will be more interesting posts after we’ve done that. I wouldn’t count on it because I know me and I know what bores my readers to tears.

So, if we didn’t do much, then what exactly did we do on this final day of the cruise, en route to Portsmouth? Well, the one thing that we did do that wasn’t eating and drinking was have a proper walk around Scarlet Lady, taking lots of video as we went.

Now, I’m not a video person normally. I know that when it comes to documenting cruises people broadly fall into the bloggers or vloggers camp. The personable, attractive, or egotistic people prefer to use video. I like the first of those sorts of people – well, the clue’s in their adjective – and seethe jealously at the second group while avoiding like the plague the third bunch. I also don’t fit into any category there which is why the written form and photography are the realms in which I inhabit. But when it comes to finding out about things – cruise ships, for instance – people also fall broadly into those who prefer to read and those who would rather watch moving images. To simply ignore one group of people trying to get information goes against what I’ve always asserted the internet should be about and so I have begun to consider embracing – after a series of microscopic baby-steps – video a little more. Maybe my voice will appear on a video in 2029. Perhaps a split-second reflection of my ears around 2036. Anything could happen.

I took a lot of video. The raw clips you don’t want to see, trust me. However, I have edited together several minutes of venues inside and outside taken across this Scarlet Lady cruise. If you’re the sort of person who prefers a seven-minute video to a four-minute read then you’re in for a treat (temporarily removed).

All the video for this cruise was taken on my phone. I had to stop to move files off my phone and onto a portable SSD a couple of times because I was running out of space. I’ll probably use more of a hybrid solution of phone and camera video in the future because my camera deals with low light so well and allows me to really play around with depth of field while my phone has better opportunities for stabilisation through using the gimbal. Gosh! Who cares about any of that!?

Video bits done in the morning, we decided it was time for just some general relaxing, and since it was around lunch time we thought we’d get a bite to eat. An aborted attempt to hit the pizza place – no available seats inside and it wasn’t really the weather for eating on the promenade deck – was followed by us walking by the Lick Me Till… Ice Cream spot and deciding to try some out. We’re really annoyed that we didn’t try some before this last day because they were fabulous. Different flavoured cones and different scoops of flavoured ice cream added up to a ridiculous number of combinations possible and we only managed two of them between us.

Ice cream is not a lunch, though, and we’d intended to find something a little more substantial when we wandered past the Sip Lounge and spotted some stands containing what looked suspiciously like an afternoon tea on them. We’d not seen them mentioned in any pre-cruise blurb, we’d not heard anyone talk about them, we’d not seen it promoted anywhere, but we sat down and asked a passing member of staff. Yes, apparently, there it was, tucked away on one page of the lounge’s menu: afternoon tea. A choice of teas and an option for some fizz as well, and of course we went for the fizz as well. It should be noted here that this was one of the few exceptions to the rule on Scarlet Lady in that this food cost extra. It should also be noted here that this was absolutely wonderful. I mean, you can tell that just from looking. Proper green tea in a proper ball tea infuser. Proper cream. Proper way too much food. Perhaps we should have ordered one afternoon tea between us, but that feels like cheating.

Criticisms of the afternoon tea on Scarlet Lady were simply that it wasn’t advertised well enough and that I could have done without the blue cheese thing. Did Virgin buy a job lot of blue cheese before sailing? It seemed to appear quite frequently in dishes.

Stuffed, we headed back to our room – you know our room; that Seriously Suite cabin – to rest with some sea views, something from the complimentary bar, and put some music on the turntable.

The final evening on Scarlet Lady started with dinner that we’d booked at the Wake restaurant. The dining venue did not disappoint in terms of its view, and the menu offered was very good indeed. There were plenty of options and you could easily come back night after night and choose something different. I decided to try the bone marrow as starters which wasn’t to my liking but hey-ho! You don’t know until you try, do you? The main course and dessert were perfectly good, though. My wife’s filet mignon main course was very good, it’s true, but it wasn’t quite to the same standard as on a Princess ship in the Crown Grill. That’s fine; everyone’s got their specialities and you can’t be the best at everything. Where Virgin excelled in this dinner was the bread. Oh my! That was incredibly good. They should just have a bread place on board that makes those. My half-Irish blood bubbled with joy eating that bread. I’m quite fond of the bread is the gist of what I’m saying here.

Just the last night to get through then, and, after a quick wander onto the aft deck to get some fresh air following dinner, we made our way back inside for some drinks to conclude this cruise. It was more crowded in most places than it had been on the previous nights but understandably so given the drop in temperature and increased wind velocity along with no pool parties to persuade the masses up on top. However, finding seats was never an issue on Scarlet Lady as she always seemed to have plenty around, and a quick message from friends saw us meeting up with them at the Roundabout area. Live music nearby, plenty of chatting, and sampling of some different alcoholic beverages once more rounded off the day nicely.

That concludes this travelogue series on our UK Scarlet Lady cruise, short simply because the cruise was short, and not in any way comprehensive because there was far more to do than we reasonably could have done and because we didn’t know what to expect so didn’t approach this trip with any firm plans. Things will be different on the next cruise. There are shows we’d like to see, cocktail evenings we’d like to attend, activities we might be interested in now that we know a little more about them.

We’d been unsure about Virgin Voyages and Scarlet Lady from the first PR releases, and we’d been convinced that what they were planning to do was unsustainable given the sort of people who cruise and the itineraries and durations proposed. She’d not been a ship we thought we’d be interested in, but pandemics and home-porting down the road from us have a way of changing people, and perhaps the delay had a way of altering Virgin’s original plans a little and tempering them towards the existing cruise fanbase a little more instead of trying to start from a clean slate. I don’t know for sure, but the result was a thoroughly, thoroughly fantastic experience. The ship’s not perfect – I really missed a proper pool to swim in and sometimes it felt she was trying too hard to be a little too different with food and drink offerings – but she’s bloody close, and none of the gimmicks felt gimmicky; they felt right. We’d talked to plenty of people on this ship and nobody had a bad word to say about her. We even talked to a retired couple who almost exclusively cruised with Cunard and they were talking about booking more cruises on Scarlet Lady. That’s quite the recommendation to try her.

Instead, this account of our 2021 Iona cruise will be split into just a few parts, each covering some noteworthy events (if there are any) and accounts of what we ate and drank on the ship, along with impressions of Iona’s design and P&O’s cruising practices in a post-lockdown world. We’re usually all about the destination with the ship being secondary, but these posts will of necessity focus on the ship and line. If you’re used to reading about cruise ships from other bloggers or watching their videos where everything is amazing and everyone is incredible then prepare to be disappointed.

It’s worth mentioning right up front, and I’ll mention it again in this travelogue series when I reach the concluding part, that this would turn out to be probably our least favourite cruise we’ve taken to date. We won’t be looking to cruise again on Iona, and P&O themselves are effectively walking a tightrope as to whether or not we’ll even look at them again too thanks to just how incredibly disappointing this cruise was (although we do have one other cruise booked with them, plus some future credit to use (or get a refund for) so they will have chances to redeem themselves in our eyes). But, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, never take a stranger’s experience too much to heart, and don’t solely use that as the basis for making your own decisions. Everybody’s different, everybody’s past experiences are different, everybody’s expectations are different, everybody’s threshold for what they consider average or outstanding is different, every cruise experience is different. This will simply be an account of our experiences on Iona, littered with grumbles and complaints. Hey, I like to grumble and complain. Other people like to tell you how amazing things are all the time. We’ve all got hobbies.

So, time to start the first part of this Iona cruise travelogue series properly, and this post will take us through the first couple of days of the cruise from embarkation through the first sea day. Expect lots of food and drink photos because we didn’t really do a whole lot else other than that to start with (I wanted to wait until the ship was further south and cruising under better weather conditions before photographing it too much).

Iona Embarkation And First Day Aboard

Oh, but this cruise on Iona got off to a terrible, terrible start.

There was a requirement to not only be fully-vaccinated (and we are, because we’re not fucking morons) but to also pass a lateral flow test for Covid-19 prior to boarding. We’d experienced this already when cruising on Regal Princess, and we’d experienced it when cruising on Scarlet Lady, and while it’s a stressful thing because it can scupper your cruise at the last second, we were used to it, we knew what to expect, we understood why it was being done, etc.

So, pre-cruise testing: if you’re cruising with a cruise line under the Carnival umbrella (and we were) and you’ve arranged parking with CPS (and we had) then the testing takes place at a drive-through marquee at a terminal near where the ship is. This was exactly the same setup as we’d gone through on Regal Princess.

This’ll be fine, we thought. Drive there, join the queue, edge forwards, get details checked, get swabbed, drive off, we thought.

No.

There were a lot more cars at the testing tent than we’d seen before. There were two reasons for this: there were two ships being tested at the same time; and Iona is a big ship, and even at reduced capacity was carrying a lot more passengers.

Now, all this would have been fine had one of two things happened. If there had been more testing locations in place to cater for the increased volume of traffic then that would have alleviated some of the problems. What I think would have been a better idea, though, would have been to stagger the testing more given that all the people arriving for the other ship were getting priority as that ship was departing several hours earlier. When one set of people are given priority it means everyone else is pushed down the queue. And down the queue we went, along with everyone else due to board Iona that day. We’d arrived almost dead on time according to our communications from P&O. It ended up taking three hours from arrival to stepping on board. We were not happy that our cruise had started with hours sitting in our cars on tarmac that could have been avoided if we’d all been asked to arrive a couple of hours later.

We finally boarded Iona with thoughts of “Well, at least the worst is over. It’ll all get better from here.” And, without wishing to spoil things, it didn’t get any worse, that’s true, but the trickle of irritations kept coming and coming. And it started with needing to attend our muster before going to our room. Having sat in a terminal for a while, passing through security, walking up the ramps, checking in at the ship entrance, all with masks on and carrying hand luggage, I can’t honestly say we were pleased to be told to head off to where we’d need to muster in case of an emergency before doing anything else. Was there a sensible purpose to it? Probably. Was it bloody annoying? Absolutely.

To the room then. A chance to see the stylish elements of Iona in relative peace (as it had all been chaotic and crowded to this point), an opportunity to quickly book the speciality dining on board through the ship’s intranet site, but also to walk face-first into the next baffling bit of P&O decision-making.

“This is so fucking stupid. You know, this is starting to get aggravating,” said my wife, but I’ll get to why in a moment.

A quick word about the room since I couldn’t be arsed to take any photos here. Modern, clean style. No complaints about the quality of anything we saw in terms of furnishings. But a tight fit in places. Not much space at the end of the bed to walk past, and exactly one wardrobe door’s width of space between the side of the bed and wardrobe. What’s that? You want to put some clothes in there? Okay, one of you – just one, mind – scuttle sideways past the door, then open the door. Lean back, get the clothes put them in, close the door. Scuttle sideways. Hang something up in another wardrobe? Scuttle, scuttle, scuttle. Inconvenient would be the term to use here. There was a sofa at the end of the room. Pretty nice. Great for getting neck ache if trying to watch the wall-mounted but non-adjustable TV positioned off-centre from the end of the bed. The bathroom we did actually like. Large, glass door shower, mirror that didn’t mist up, and a night light that meant you wouldn’t disturb your partner in the room when the need to flush alcohol inevitably prodded you awake.

Speaking of alcohol brings us back to that aggravating and bewilderingly crap decision from P&O…

Upon arrival at our room we found an envelope with our cruise cards (I much prefer to pick these up before boarding, but that’s by the by). Open envelope. Enter room. On the bed was another envelope. Any thoughts that this might be some kind of treasure hunt to entertain boarding guests went out the window immediately. A letter.

Thank you for pre-purchasing the drinks package. For your convenience before you can have any drinks you’re going to need to have a small coloured sticker attached to your card for some unfathomable reason in this day and age of technology. Is the coloured sticker in this envelope? No! Did we put the coloured sticker on the cards we attached to your door? Also no! Are we now going to send you up several more decks to join a queue of people at a bar beside the pool in the dome, many of whom will be grumbling about why we just didn’t put the fucking sticker on the cards since you’d bought the package already? We just might! Will the people who have to put the sticker on your cards have an alphabetised or numerically-sorted list of people and rooms to compare your name and cabin against? I don’t think so! Please get ready to enjoy the spectacle of staff members running their fingers down pages and pages of lists of people in a random order to try to find your name!

“Maybe…. maybe now things will start to settle down. That’s probably all the shit little things done. Let’s get a drink.”

We arrived at the bar just in time for an announcement that the crew would be undertaking mandatory muster drill tests for the next ten minutes and all bars were closed.

We gazed across at the taps on the bar and eventually ordered drinks.

“I’d like a pint of Aspall’s,” said my wife. You’ll spot that what she got was Old Peculier in the photo below. I just about managed to hold back my wife’s loud utterance of “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” when told they didn’t have any Aspall’s on board. They never have the first thing we order aboard P&O ships. It’s a tradition we’d like to see go the way of the dodo.

We stayed for a second drink and got chatting to a couple on the table next to us, comparing how long we’d all waited in the car park and what our first thoughts of Iona were. We discovered that they’d boarded half an hour after us and, like us, immediately tried to book speciality dining knowing that these things get booked up pretty quickly. Too quickly for them, as it turned out, as all options were sold out. We’d actually gotten lucky here but this did highlight another incredibly poor bit of management aboard P&O’s ship; namely, that if you get on the ship late then you’re fucked. In fact, you could see that if you’d arrived on foot and been tested at the terminal before boarding then you’d probably have got on a lot earlier and would have had the pick of choices. Paid for parking? Made to queue for hours? Let’s take your mind off that annoyance by taking away some food options you might have been looking forward to, too.

The Glass House

We hadn’t booked anything special for embarkation day so decided to eat in the Glass House for the first night aboard P&O’s Iona. Actually, we were left with eating in the Glass House when we took at look at what P&O call their app but what is really just a fairly basic intranet portal site. The Glass House was the only thing listed. Now, it’s entirely possible that we could have gone to the main dining room anyway but that wasn’t immediately obvious. I would end up having a conversation with one of the dining booking people later in this cruise asking how it was possible to tell the difference between a venue not having availability yet and a venue being completely full for the entire night when the option to virtually queue seemed to randomly appear and disappear from locations around the ship. More on that confusing system in a subsequent post.

We remembered the Glass House from our cruises on Azura and Ventura previously. We’d really liked the Glass House on those ships. We didn’t like the Glass House quite so much on Iona but there was nothing wrong with it, per se. As with a lot of features across the P&O fleet in recent years, the Glass House had undergone a bit of a more refined upgrade. Fancier food, basically. We’d really been looking forward to some of the more basic but so very tasty food choices we’d had on other ships so this was a minor disappointment. But, to give Iona its due, there is a Quays area on the ship that is very good and does some of those basic food options like fish and chips, and it’s included in the price. So, arguably, an improvement. Accompanying wines in the Glass House, though, were not an improvement, but that’s down to so many exclusions from the drinks package. That’s been covered in my “short” list of good and bad points about Iona. I’m going to try not to repeat myself too much in these travelogues but, yeah, that drinks package was a terrible purchase for us based on our drinking style, and a huge regret from this cruise as a whole.

But, the food in the Glass House: yes, it was all very good, and the location around the expansive, light, and airy atrium was very nice. Glass House menus and photos of the dishes we picked are below for you to try to guess what we selected.

Iona started to disembark from Southampton as we finished our meal so we wandered out onto the wide, wraparound promenade deck to take a look at the city at night. We’ve never cruised out of Southampton so late in the day before but it’s obviously an easier decision to make for a cruise line when you don’t really need to get anywhere for a specific time.

We were pleased to see Sky Princess in dock as we left. Sky Princess would be the cruise ship we would sail on a month after this cruise on Iona (spoiler alert: Sky Princess was fantastic!) and we could hear loud music and see flashing lights on the mostly empty vessel as we glided past.

First Sea Day On Iona

We’d gone to bed fairly early the night before as my wife started to get a headache. It could have been the stress of all the tiny annoyances mounting up, but we’ll never know.

The view from our balcony (deck 12) was what we like about cruising. Sea. Sky. Occasional land masses on the horizon. The Channel Islands in this case. The feel and sounds from our balcony were what we like about cruising, too. Fresh air. The white noise from the ship cutting through the water. The gentle undulation that lets your body know you’re not stuck on land.

We could look down onto the promenade deck from our balcony where loungers lay in waiting for those who wanted to relax in full view of everyone’s rooms, and where some crazy souls were taking in brisk walks around the ship to burn off calories. Iona is the first ship we’ve been on with an uncovered promenade deck like this set out from the main banks of cabins. We would come to understand on this cruise that the reasoning behind this would be to give more outside space for sun worshippers to make up for the distinct lack of it on the top of the ship. We would come to realise that starry sky worshippers such as ourselves would be fucked over by this decision because the only view we would get at night would be a washed-out, light-polluted glare thanks to the spotlights all along the promenade’s edges. Thanks, P&O. Another one for the list of grumbles.

After breakfast we had a quick look around some of the spaces before seeing what the morning quiz would be like in Brodie’s on Iona.

We won the quiz!

This had never happened on a P&O ship for us before. We’ve done really well on other cruise lines but P&O has always seemed to set questions that other people like and we don’t. But we won. Our prize would come later in the week because Iona used a prize passport system where stamps were accrued for winning things and these could be exchanged for gifts at the end of the cruise. This was something we really liked on this cruise. This was something we’d like to see other lines copy.

In the photos below you’ll see a picture of the gin distillery equipment aboard Iona. This was a feature of Iona we were quite keen to experience but never did. We’d wanted to buy a bottle of the gin distilled at sea and take it home with us, but tax and revenue rules meant that because the ship never docked outside the UK none of the gin produced on board could be sold. The only bottles you could buy were distilled on land. Well, what’s the point of that? If you’re cruising on Iona and she does hit a foreign port then you’ll probably be able to do what we couldn’t. C’est la vie.

The Olive Grove

For lunch we decided to see if we could get into the Olive Grove as we’d heard good things about it. We checked the not-an-app and saw it was listed and open so wandered up and were seated immediately. This would be the only time we could get into this place as it was apparently booked solid for the rest of the week. Lots of empty tables when we checked and told no, sorry, and on a vessel at very reduced capacity. Hmmm.

Anyway, the fact that we tried to get in on more than one occasion tells you that the Olive Grove was good. It was good. It wasn’t perfect because my tagine came with some staff member’s long hair strung through it. Fairly low on the gross-o-meter to me but it still registers as an unpleasant discovery. The less hirsute part of the tagine was gorgeous.

The afternoon was spent with books and a few drinks. Our time in the Emerald Bar was enjoyable because we got to watch some acrobats rehearsing and training for shows.

Sindhu On Iona

The first of our speciality dining reservations was for this first full day at sea on this cruise, and it was the one we’d been most keen to book simply because we’d never been able to do so on any previous cruise with P&O. This was Sindhu.

Everyone who cruises with P&O raves about Sindhu. Or they used to. It was something we’d not managed to experience before and we are keen to experience new things; that’s what travel is all about for us. Counter to that, though, is the fact that neither of us like Asian food very much. We definitely don’t like heat. We’re old school when it comes to eating food: we like a mix of textures, something attractive and cared for, and a range of complementary flavours. And we’d like to be able to feel our lips afterwards and not be crying. How would Sindhu fare?

In a later post in this short travelogue series I’ll put up some photos of Sindhu from a day exploring the ship. There isn’t much to go on here because people were eating and I wanted to respect their privacy to some extent but believe me when I say that Sindhu on Iona looked utterly stunning. A more beautiful restaurant, we’ve not dined in. Loads of golds, even reflected in the high quality cutlery and placemats.

As for the meal: well, we didn’t have anything to really compare it with so we found it okay. There was some heat, but not a lot in what we picked. But we also found that much of it all tasted the same. The spices seemed to be the same mix for most dishes. Oh, it’s a blend of spices in meat-shaped food! What meat is it? Absolutely no idea! Well, what about that different meat next to it? That also tastes like a blend of spices in a meat texture shape. It does look like a different meat but it could be anything from swordfish to elephant with the flavourings used. What about that dip? What sort of dip is it? It’s a yellowy-brown dip that seems to enhance the meat spices more and numb the tongue. Do you think the peas taste like peas? Let’s see. These could also be spicy meat, just coloured green to be fair. Is all Indian food like this? Maybe. Okay then.

Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, and we thought that the meal was reasonable given what we had and what we paid for it. The service was pretty perfunctory and possibly even a smidge snooty but that just generally seems to be the way P&O have decided they want their ships run these days so we can’t complain too much there. However, we did talk to another couple later in the cruise and the subject of Sindhu came up as they’d been in here as well on one of the nights. They were experienced Sindhu diners, having eaten in the restaurant on numerous other ships over the years. Where we had nothing to compare and felt it had all been okay but not really our sort of thing, they were scathing. It used to be like a banquet, they told us. There used to be a feeling of flair and drama and showiness. It used to feel like a special event. They likened their Sindhu on Iona experience to little better than any half-decent Indian restaurant.

After dinner we felt like hitting a bar or lounge. You’re surprised by this news, I can tell. We’d not been to the Crow’s Nest thus far so felt like hitting there for a few late night drinks to conclude our first full day on Iona. “I’d like a Woodford Reserve,” I told the staff member who came to take our orders. “That’s not included in the drinks package,” he replied. “But it’s under the price limit point,” I replied. “Sorry,” he said. We ordered other drinks and took them back to our room because we were feeling pissed off. Again. Later in the cruise we’d have no problem ordering a Woodford Reserve at all so, yeah, thanks a lot for that.

That brings part one of this Iona seacation cruise travelogue series to an end. In the next part I’ll cover the ship in some detail with a walk around its upper deck, promenade deck, and inside.

Because this was a week at sea with no port stops I’m not going to follow the usual pattern of a travelogue series of posts covering daily events, simply because they’d all be a bit samey. Instead, this second part of the cruise series will follow me on a mid-cruise walk around the ship, starting at the top, outside. and working down then inside.

But first, events of note on the morning of the second full day at sea…

Evacuation

It’s not very usual for there to be much to report on a sea day – a problem when your cruise is nothing but sea days, as this one on Iona was, what with the state of the world – but our second full day aboard this ship was rammed (relatively) with points of interest. I think it’s fair to say that this would be the best of the days we spent on Iona.

To start with, we won the first of the day’s trivia quizzes. The previous day had not only also seen us win a trivia quiz, that had also marked the very first time we’d ever won a trivia quiz on a P&O ship. We’d anticipated that first occasion simply being an aberration soon to be smoothed over and erased by the universe, but here we were, strolling into the pub, winning it again.

And then we won the afternoon trivia quiz too. Three in a row, if you’re counting. This was a real shock. We tried to consider why this might be the case. Certainly, we were no smarter. Eighteen months in lockdown and the additional alcohol that had destroyed countless neurons during it could not possibly have targeted the bits of the brain that held just the useless facts, surely? Obviously, the quiz might’ve been a little easier, a little less geared towards tabloid-readers and soap-watchers and reality show-fans, and it was difficult to think of another reason as, despite Iona’s less-than-capacity sailing, she was still packing a passenger manifest comparable to some of the medium-large vessels in the fleet. Oh well. More stamps for the quiz passport.

Quizzing was accompanied by drinking. We were on holiday, I’ll have you know. P&O do a pretty decent range of ales on their ships. Whether they have them in stock is another matter entirely, but in principle this is an area where they’re a lot better than many other cruise lines we’ve sailed with.

Between quizzes I headed off to the theatre to see a talk by Sue Holderness wherein she described and showed clips from some of her earliest roles plus the one she was most famous for, playing Marlene in Only Fools and Horses and The Green, Green Grass. Always nice to hear anecdotes from stage and screen luvvies, but sitting in a theatre for a show where you’re required to wear a mask throughout doesn’t make for the best experience. You can sit in a small bar, drink, talk, laugh, all with no mask; you can’t sit quietly in a spacious theatre without one. It’s hard to imagine the science behind that thinking and I’ve got a cracking imagination. Anyway, this would be the only visit to the theatre while on Iona.

Drama in the morning came in the form of an air evacuation by helicopter. As is the case whenever this happens – and we’ve witnessed it a fair few times now (get travel insurance; you don’t want to pay for this sort of trip on top of everything else) – the upper decks are cleared and the balconies fill up with people gawping up at the big flying thing with the whirly blades. I’m not mocking because we always look too. Quite what we’re expecting to see that we’ve not seen before is anyone’s guess. Not wanting to make light of a situation that is anything but pleasant for those whom the aircraft has been required, a helicopter hovering over your ship moving at sea is nevertheless interesting.

The evening would then see us experience the highlight of our week aboard Iona with a visit to the Limelight Club, but that’s for the next post. Let’s now return to a look around this cruise ship and our thoughts about it.

Exploring Iona

We decided to have a wander around the top of the ship to start this exploration of Iona. First stop was to the two, small, infinity pools at the upper aft of the ship. When I think of infinity I think of the deep, dark, unimaginable breadth of the universe. Iona’s infinity pools did not convey quite that same feeling of utter insignificance, lost in vastness incomprehensible to human brains, but, to give P&O their dues, they did maintain the swimming pool temperature at just a few degrees above Absolute Zero so fair play there.

I was quite taken with these structures on Iona, pictured below. Not a clue as to what their purpose is. Modern mystery monoliths. More ships should have them. Have your passengers ponder the unfathomable while they relax at sea.

An overcast day on a ship devoid of children didn’t show off the features of a splash pool area in the best possible light. This probably looks lovely in the Caribbean with kids running around, screaming, laughing, getting wet, having fun. If you like the idea of kids running around, screaming, laughing, getting wet, having fun, that is. I don’t. But I did like the splash of green on the artificial palm tree. Green looks out of place on a cruise ship. Cruise ships are places connected to the sea and the open skies; they’re blue places and white places with occasional important bits in red, like funnels, for instance, which you shouldn’t touch as they might be hot. Green feels a little bit naughty and wrong at sea. That’s why the miniature golf areas on ships are only used by swingers. Cruise fact.

As we headed forward it was easier to get a feel for just how little space there was on the upper decks of Iona for people. Take a look at the loungers and chairs and consider this: I’m not skipping anything here. This is it in terms of sun-worshipping spots up top on this cruise ship that, at full capacity, can rock in at over five thousand passengers. Half of those people will likely be men. A high percentage of those men will be overweight and have hairy backs. And they might be pressed up close to you on a lounger to squeeze in as many people as possible. Under a hot sun in the tropics. Sweating. Just saying.

A large part of the problem of lack of deck space on top on Iona comes from the domed swimming pool and evening entertainment venue which, being circular in cross-section (like all good domes), eats up a ridiculously large area. A squared-off upper section would free up more room outside. Look at what this does to the top deck in the first photo below. It probably looked lovely on the architectural designs and CGI mock-ups with their tiny number of very thin, very pretty families smiling under a blue sky, but the result is this. It’s unusable. It’s a bloody eyesore.

The interior is a puzzle too. Its practical use as a swimming pool sheltered from the elements disappears in the evening when the stage is rolled over the top. Okay, not many people go swimming in the evening. Still, it does remain a swimming pool with water during any performances taking place above it so that leads to humidity. Plus the acoustics are just appalling. And just because I’m someone who has crippling tinnitus and finds all acoustics appalling that doesn’t negate that objective review of the sound quality we experienced on a number of evenings as we wandered through.

I’m also quite bemused by the sort of people who you can see seated in the photos below. Rows of chairs facing the swimming pool. Under glass. Under clouds. Nobody in the water or looking like that’s likely to happen soon.

Shall we find somewhere to read, Beryl?

Let’s do that, Jean.

The dome?

Yes. Perfect. Just the right sort of echoing noise with just the right amount of people constantly wandering through to the buffet or back to the elevators.

Ooh, looks like there’s a couple of chairs there. Fantastic view of the backs of a group of people’s heads with just the top of the swimming pool in the gaps between them.

Don’t want anything too distracting!

Wait! Is that grass on the wall?

Shit! Green! This is a swingers dome! Run!

Back outside and continuing forward, we ended up at the second of the swimming pools, the Beachcomber Pool. This pool and its accompanying seating area looked the part and perhaps even would have looked positively inviting on another day, but the wind that was whipping in across the ship seemed to be directed down and around all those circular designs, forming little whirlwinds of wickedly wintry-feeling breezes. Being the foremost pool on Iona and being close to the Retreat area, we guessed that this was effectively the equivalent of the adults-only pool that you’d find on most other vessels in the P&O and Princess fleets, and would be quieter and the place you’d go if you actually wanted a swim. Perhaps that was the thought behind it, but a combination of there being nowhere else to go up top would mean that any attempt to get a swim in here was foiled on this week aboard as whenever the weather was remotely pleasant enough to consider a dip, this part of the ship would be absolutely jammed solid with people standing around and drinking. Nowhere to sit, nowhere to drop bags and clothes where you could keep an eye on them, and, with nobody else venturing into the water, no inclination to be the only people in it while surrounded by over a hundred fellow passengers.

That completed our exterior tour of the top of the ship so we headed down. The stairwells on Iona are decorated by abstract, circular artwork, and you soon realise that each stairwell – front, middle, and aft – has a different colour. That’s to help you work out where you are on the ship, assuming you can remember which one is which, which we never could. Was the reddish one for the sunrise or the sunset? Was the blue one for the horizon you’re looking towards or the one you’re looking back at? Was the white one the moon high above or the wake or that iceberg you’re trying not to hit?

We headed out for a quick amble around the promenade deck. The good thing about Iona’s promenade deck is that it’s wide and a full wraparound deck. Handy for people who like to walk circuits of the ship. Or weirdos, as they’re known. We like to do one, maximum, per day, and more likely one a week, because we’re only slightly weirdo-oriented. But there are big problems with this area of the ship.

As soon as the clouds cleared, this deck became rammed. It had to, because the top deck space was already filled. And, remember, like you’re going to forget with the number of times I mention this, this was on a half-capacity ship. Lots of people, quite a bit of noise, all that sound drifting up to be heard on the balconies; you know, those usually quiet spots you’ve paid extra for because of the peace and privacy and views you thought they had.

At least we were up several decks from the promenade area. For the people on the lowest deck it had to have been terrible. Paid even more for a special conservatory area and the expectation of some lovely sea views? Well, you might be able to see the sea on occasion, so long as there aren’t people lounging on chairs outside your room, walking past, or clambering in or out of the little pools in front of the glass, flashing their blubber in your general direction and obscuring the horizon. Sit in your conservatory and enjoy some quiet time? Only if nobody’s outside and talking, laughing, or drinking, or someone walking past doesn’t decide to lean over the railing and ask you what it’s like to spend your holiday in a goldfish bowl. Ever step out of the shower and just wander into your room starkers with the light on and curtains open in the evening? Yeah, you have. Okay, at least you can still do that and hopefully traumatise some perambulating passengers in the process. Bonus.

But Mark, I like the idea of being close to those little pools and being part of the general hum and activity of people enjoying a few drinks, and I don’t care about sea views because I normally get an inside cabin, and I just love people seeing me!

Yeah, I’m more of a normal person, myself, but I do understand that people repeatedly dropped on their heads as kids do have opinions too, so, sure, you might enjoy it. It’s still a stupid cruise ship design decision, but at least it’s a stupid design decision that affects those who like their balconies during the day equally as much as those who like their balconies during the night. People like us. We like quiet reading spots and sea views in daylight; well, no quiet on Iona. We like late night drinks and staring at the stars from our balconies when the sun goes down; well, tough titties there too, thanks to the uncovered promenade casting the light pollution from a small city upwards in a curtain of haze obliterating everything in the night sky with a positive apparent magnitude.

Despite its many, many, many, many, terrible design decisions, like a lot of Iona, the promenade deck looked nice. You can attribute that to it being a new ship, not marked by the wear and tear that comes to all ships – and people – but we’ve always favoured substance over style and would have liked someone more practical to have been in charge of decision-making. You might be different; you might like shiny and pretty and not really care how something’s used long-term because you’ll be off and oohing and aahing over the next shiny, pretty thing to distract you. You might love everything about Iona. Clearly, we didn’t, but on the promenade deck I did like the narrower, curved area that ran outside the main atrium windows. This worked well to break up the straight lines down the ship stylistically, but also removed the possibility of seating, thus ensuring that those inside could, for the most part, still enjoy attractive, vast seascapes.

The aft area of the promenade deck was a nice spot too, with extended deck space to support a bar, seating, and a couple of large hot tubs. Another of those areas that got rammed as soon as the sun broke through and the same issue with aft balconies having a noisier, less-than-ideal view of the wake to contend with. Still, we enjoyed a couple of early mornings after breakfast here with coffees, and got to realise quickly that nobody was following the rules about limiting their time and group sizes in the tubs to know that we’d only get angry if we turned up as its popularity and population size increased later in the day, to avoid it completely.

A few more photos to complete the circuit of Iona’s promenade deck before heading inside the ship.

We entered the atrium of Iona on the top level as that’s where the promenade deck was located. You can see the curving walkway outside the windows in the photos below. This upper area of the atrium also contained a few restaurant locations that are additional, but reasonable, charges to your cruise price. In fact, for this week’s cruise on Iona we never once ate in the main, included restaurants aboard in the evening, instead going for speciality dining in Sindhu, the Epicurean, the Limelight Club, the Beach House, and from this atrium area, the Glass House once, and Keel & Cow twice. We likely would have swapped one of those Keel & Cow visits out for one of the main restaurants if we’d had any confidence that there were spaces available thanks to the confusion over virtual queues and whether or not a restaurant being listed on the ship’s intranet site meant there was no availability or no queue (we learned from talking to one of the crew that it meant both or neither depending on which sentence she said yes to).

There’s no escaping the fact that Iona’s atrium is bright, open, and airy. Certainly, when comparing it to other ships we’ve been on, there was very much an initial “Wow! Big! Light!”

But I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t ruining any positive aspects of a cruise ship’s review with some negative things to highlight and bring balance to the universe. The killer here was seating. Look how large this central part of the ship is, then consider that the vast majority of the chairs and tables on the top level are reserved for dining, then have a quick count of seats that you can see on the other levels. Five thousand people on this ship post-pandemic. Any significant percentage of that number who want to see something taking place in the atrium is going to be carnage. I look forward to seeing the photos and videos of early evenings on Iona when she’s running at full capacity somewhere and it’s raining outside.

Something we really liked on Iona were the clock projections on the floor dotted around the place. Different, but useful.

Another good addition on Iona, in our opinion, was an area called The Quays. These were small, included dining venues offering a number of styles of food, changing their limited menus a few times during the day to cater for different dining periods. The fish and chips was lovely and succeeded in making up for its exclusion from the Glass House menu, especially given you could now have it for free.

Close to The Quays but a separate and extra charge restaurant in its own right was Sindhu. You can read about our dining experience there in the previous post of this Iona series, but while the food was in our opinion okay, just not quite to our taste (although experienced Sindhu diners claimed it had gone downhill considerably), the dining venue itself was a work of art. Utterly gorgeous design, and you can tell that P&O know that their usual cruisers like Sindhu a lot so they wanted to put a lot of effort into making this stand out for the memories.

Like pretty much any cruise ship, you’ll find shops, a casino, and an art gallery on Iona, but of the three types of location we only passed through the art gallery once and popped into the shops on a couple of occasions to pick up some souvenirs for ourselves and our niece. The casino is not a place that’s ever interested us but it was nice to see signs up saying that photography was permitted when people weren’t playing as we normally see these parts of ships protected by signs forbidding photography and videography lest you uncover the terrible secret that is cruise ship casinos don’t have to abide by pay-out percentage rules that apply on land.

Something a little unusual to see, although we didn’t pay it a visit during this cruise as nothing showing there interested us enough to spend hours in a small room, masked, trying not to thwack people turning up late and talking as they inevitably would have, was the multi-screen cinema.

Iona has pretty much two main mostly-just-drinking lounges away from the atrium and top decks, with one of those, Anderson’s, being a library-cum-gin-joint. It’s flashier than a gin joint, in fairness, and if the gins had been included in our horrible drinks package then we’d likely have enjoyed spending time here and taking an alcoholic wander through its menu. But it didn’t, because the drinks package is a rip-off. So we didn’t, because we don’t like being taken advantage of.

Attached to Anderson’s was the still equipment used to make the gin that you can get aboard. Tax rules due to us not stopping at any foreign ports meant that we weren’t allowed to purchase any gin that had been manufactured on Iona so that scuppered that plan. We could have bought some of the Mirabelle gin that had been produced on land but, seriously, why would you?

The other lounge or bar, Brodie’s, was where we spent most of our drinking time on Iona, mostly because we could get beers there and because it hosted the quizzes that we kept winning.

Two evening clubs could be reached just off the atrium. Our visit to the Limelight Club will be covered in the next post in this Iona cruise series. The Limelight featured a meal with entertainment for which you needed to book and pay, followed by an open period later for some music from the fabulous house band. We never tried the 710 Club because there was no booking for it and you needed, instead, to queue across the atrium floor and hope to hell you could get in for the set musical entertainment which by all accounts wasn’t guaranteed as some people just didn’t leave once they’d found a place with seats, and the venue wasn’t large. And again, how this will work when you double the number of people aboard is an utter mystery. Nevertheless, if you like to stand around for half an hour to maybe be told there’s a seat in a small room that you need to vacate inside the hour, then this sounds like it will be right up your street.

The Club House at the aft of the ship was the largest of the lounges aboard, hosting entertainment in the evening, either comedic or musical, followed by a DJ into the early hours. We quickly discovered that if you wanted a seat then you needed to get here early or after the shows because there was no chance just before or while they were on. Is this the point where a certain someone mentions we were at half-capacity again? No. What do you take me for? Now, I will point out, though, that some of the tables had markers on them indicating they were not to be sat at, part of the Covid rules in place, but these markers had the strangest way of being pushed onto the floor or flipped over to indicate that the table was in reality free and available. On the one hand we don’t like to see rules being flouted, but these were stupid rules given how airborne transmission works and how low the risk was for a ship with vaccinated and tested adults only aboard, so it’s only fair to admit that we encouraged others to break the rules once we saw others doing it and no crew members caring.

The photo from the Club House below was taken late one night after most people had headed off to bed because we didn’t venture into this area during the day, and there will be more photos from this location in the next post when I cover food and entertainment.

The final spot to share a photos of from aboard Iona in this post is the Crow’s Nest, an immensely disappointing spot up top and with views out to sea during the day that turn into views of pure blackness and reflected lights at night. What was disappointing about it was how cramped it felt – we’ve visited similar areas on other ships that are open affairs, and on a ship the size of Iona we expected a lot more than what we experienced – and the poor drinks service we received each time we visited. Telling me incorrectly that drinks I wanted weren’t included in the crappy drinks package was bad enough, but of the microscopically small number of cocktails that we could get, to discover this bar had run out of the ingredients for most of them on the third day was just poor.

Okay then.

That’s the look around the various parts of Iona I felt inspired enough to photograph. In the next post in this series I’ll cover food and entertainment, not including those first two nights of dining because that would be silly as I’ve done them already. That post will include the best evening aboard Iona at the Limelight Club with some fabulous post-meal entertainment from La Voix, a mixed bag of entertainment and service from the Club House across a few nights, and just a puzzlingly awful Celebration Night and meal at the Epicurean.

In Part One of this Iona series, I talked about the embarkation process and the first couple of days on the ship. Part Two showed off the ship’s mostly bland decor and baffling design decisions. You’ve probably got a fair idea about what Part Three will cover because your reputation for reading words and comprehending them precedes you; food and entertainment, mostly because there’s nothing else to talk about. With this trip being seven days with no ports of call – something that sounded great in principle for a relaxing break during the pandemic – there’s only so much you can write. Had there been any stops, this might have been a whole different account. We might have seen the ship in a different light, rather than coming away with the sense that our break from work could have been better spent.

Dining On P&O Iona

The Glass House, the Olive Grove, and Sindhu were all covered in the first of this series, so jump back to that if you’d like to read about what we thought in detail and see some photos. If you can’t be bothered, or you’re here to hear what we thought about the other options, then in summary, and respectively for those three: Okay, Good, Okay. Sindhu was the best-looking location on the entire ship (see the second part for loads of photos), and the only complaint about the food from us really from those locations – despite the Good rating – was a long hair in my tagine. That said, another couple we spoke to, who had dined at Sindhu before, remarked that the quality of the food and general feel of the occasion was a huge let-down. We’ll come back to that later in this post.

For the remainder of this article I’ll take the days in sequence so you can see how we worked in getting to all the speciality (read: additional cost) dining spots on Iona. In fact, the one thing we didn’t do aboard was eat dinner in the main dining room. Perhaps that’s where we went wrong. Maybe that would have been the catalyst to thinking “Yeah! Iona is amazing!” I have my doubts, though, because I’m not a gibbering idiot.

Iona: Limelight Club

We’d been extremely lucky when getting on the ship (eventually) to just be able to get onto the booking system to book restaurants. I moan more about this insanely unfair system and how we’d met other people who hadn’t been so fortunate earlier in this series. We’d been able to pick off all the recommendations from seasoned P&O cruisers which is why we’d already ticked off Sindhu on the second day at sea and would be seeing what all the fuss was about at the Limelight Club on day three.

For a post talking about the food and entertainment on a cruise ship, it’s fitting that the Limelight Club covers all the bases. Unlike other venues on the vessel where you can eat or you can be entertained, the Limelight Club combines the two in a nightclub-like environment that includes a meal followed by some sort of show. This combination of food and a show was not something we’d experienced on any other cruise, and not only did it work well, this was by far the stand-out evening on Iona, and as a concept it’s something we’d love to see on other cruise lines.

This entire day was an interesting one. We’d started off winning the morning trivia, I’d gone to see Sue Holderness give a talk about her time in show business, we’d been distracted by the ship needing to turn around to assist in an emergency air evacuation, and we’d then won the afternoon trivia too.

The only blot on the day was thinking it would be nice to head to Anderson’s to see what their gin selection was like, then discovering that the abysmal drinks package we’d foolishly purchased wouldn’t even cover a drink in the bar. The range of gins also looked to be decidedly poorer than we recalled of other P&O ships, but that might have been the clouds forming in our minds obscuring our recollection of the menus.

To the Limelight Club, then.

Upon arrival we were shown to the table allocated for us. As you can see below, my view of the small stage area wasn’t ideal, with a column right in the way. Relax, though, because there’s food to eat first and we’d be able to shift our chairs a bit once that was over.

The food wasn’t the best food you’re going to have on a cruise ship. The thing about cruising is that all the food tends to be of a pretty high standard anyway so you have to put in extra effort to stand out. With the small surcharge for the evening in the Limelight Club you can tell that the majority of that shifts towards the special entertainment rather than the special food. The food was still very good, of course.

The entertainment was fabulous in the Limelight Club. In addition to the main act was the house band, an all-female group known as The Limelights. A lot of talent on display there, and there’s some video of them later in this post. The Limelights then formed the backing group for the main act itself, which can vary from cruise to cruise, but for us was the drag performer, La Voix. This was a thoroughly enjoyable evening; catty comments, jokes, and plenty of singing. I did take video. Quite a lot, in fact. Not uploaded here, though, for reasons.

After enjoying ourselves at the club, we felt like a bit more of the same so ended the evening (well, the early hours of the next morning) at the Club House. Located at the aft of Iona, this is the largest venue aboard, easily able to comfortably seat a good two-thirds of the people who turn up when the ship is only running at half-capacity. You do the maths. This is the place for lectures, comedy, music, and dancing.

We arrived in time to grab one of the only remaining seats in the place, just as the resident comedian started his act. I cannot do justice to just what a terrible comedy act it was, but I won’t share his name to save any embarrassment. People around us were laughing quite a bit because, of course, everyone’s different and everyone has different tastes, but mother-in-law jokes… Really? In the 21st century? For us it was an excruciating experience. For the Daily Mail readers around, a great old return to the good old days.

After the comedy there was singing from Rebecca Neale. This was much better, and it was followed by a disco, although the place was emptying fairly quickly by this time of the night. Quite where everyone was off to is anyone’s guess; there were no port stops. Of course, the DJ – one of those who feels his voice and observations are at least as important as the music – might have had something to do with that. The best part about the Club House was that we discovered that they did Whiskey Sours and that these were actually something that our terrible drinks package included.

Celebration Night And The Epicurean

The following day’s excitement came when we spotted some whales alongside Iona. One of the great things about having a balcony on a cruise ship.

The evening would be Iona’s Celebration Night.

Think of Celebration Night as a slightly informal, formal night. The expectation was to dress up, and since we’d booked dinner at the Epicurean, this suited us. A fancy meal for a fancy night. We hoped. After we’d dressed to impress we caught the start of a sunset from our room before heading down the stairs to the top of the atrium (the only place with any seats) with our free drink tokens in hand.

It took around ten minutes for us to be spotted, and there were a few grumblings from other couples and groups nearby, doing meerkat impressions as they looked around for any members of staff, but we eventually all got our complimentary glasses of fizz. We were quiet, with that resigned look of “Well, what do you expect from this cruise?” After our glasses had arrived we were approached by two members of staff – one male, one female, both in posh dress, both masked (of course) – who wanted to show us some close-up magic. This reminded us a lot of our cruise on Scarlet Lady and was a nice touch we’d not seen on other P&O ships. Part of one trick involved the female assistant tearing away at a piece of folded up card to eventually produce silhouette of Marilyn Monroe that we could keep. Again: nice.

The remainder of the time waiting for our dinner booking to come around was spent gazing out at the setting sun through Iona’s huge atrium windows, and the people walking outside to admire it in the open air.

Time to have some dinner at the Epicurean. We’ve dined at P&O’s fanciest establishment once before, on Azura in 2017. That was reasonable, not brilliant, but decent enough, and in a pleasant location. When we’d booked on embarkation day our expectations were high that everything would be that little bit better on the fleet’s newest ship, but as the days had passed some trepidation about what we might end up with started to creep in.

Let’s take a look at the Epicurean menu first:

It all looked lovely, and we quickly came to a decision and placed our orders as a small glass of something was delivered to whet the appetite, along with some bread rolls and butter. And so the waiting began.

The bottle of wine we ordered made an appearance at our table a mere thirty-one minutes after ordering while we’d mostly sat in silence. I say mostly, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Our starter courses turned up within another ten minutes, but this still put them at arriving close to forty minutes after ordering. We like relaxed pace dining when it’s somewhere fancy, but this was a glacial start to the evening.

I won’t bore you any further with how long the individual bits and pieces took to arrive at the table but can let you know that this meal took over two and a quarter hours to get through, in a restaurant that was, at best, half-full. Our main courses:

And finally, the palate cleanser, desserts, and sweet to finish.

Service, in addition to being slow enough for sloths to start tapping their wrists and making circular motions with their claws, was perfunctory. The restaurant was decidedly unimpressive in its look and location. The food in itself was simply not worth the additional cost.

But let’s return to that “mostly sat in silence” comment from earlier.

We became aware, as we sat there, sighing and looking around, waiting for anything to happen, that there was a noise above our heads. A rumbling, grating sound. Had it been constant, maybe we’d have got used to this intrusion into whatever sort of ambience there was, but it wasn’t. Had it been happening only occasionally then we might have passed it off as something taking place on the deck above. But it was not that either. I got my phone out and started the stopwatch just for something to do. Thirty seconds of rumbling, grating, clonking. Ninety seconds of silence. Thirty seconds of rumbling, grating, clonking. Ninety seconds of silence. Repeat. It was thirty and ninety seconds every time, throughout the entire meal.

“The air conditioning is terrible,” I told my wife. “If it is the air conditioning. Maybe it’s something else. How can they not know about this? How can it be this bad on a ship this new? How can they position people right under this racket?”

A gesture of defeat from her, so I waited until a member of the waiting staff turned up.

“Hi, can you confirm to me what that noise is?” I asked, pointing to some invisible thing in the air above our heads, just as it started up once more.

“Those are chairs stacked on the deck above,” she replied quickly. “Someone is probably just moving them.”

“But it’s constantly repeating at the same interval,” I answered in a puzzled tone. I pictured a person on the ship whose job it was to just slide a stack of chairs from one side of a deck to another with pauses inbetween.

“As the ship moves, the chairs move a little,” was the swift response. Practiced response, one could almost say.

After she’d left: “Well, that was a stinking pile of bullshit,” my wife stated, not needing any reply from me.

The Epicurean on P&O Iona, then. Pretty bloody awful experience all round. Our first encounter years before hadn’t impressed us immensely either and, like the couple who talked about Sindhu, we felt this was a restaurant that had done the exact opposite of improving.

Dining Room Lunch And Aerial Acrobatics

I mentioned earlier that we didn’t have dinner in the main dining room on Iona but we did do something that we rarely do on any cruises: we had lunch there. We even used the intranet site aboard ship to book into the virtual queue, which turned out to be pointless as fewer than a dozen of us were waiting to enter when the doors eventually opened several minutes late. A nice enough restaurant space greeted us but that stupidly slow service was there too, especially when factoring in how few people were having lunch at the same time. At lunch, if we’re going to have lunch, we’re used to grabbing something quick in the buffet or at one of the fast food joints around the pool when we’re on a ship. This lunch took over an hour. My chips were hot. My wife’s were not. If the goal was to persuade us not to bother with lunch in the main dining room on the ship then job well done, P&O. In fact, it makes you wonder whether the fact it was so empty was because everyone else had already come to that conclusion this far into the cruise.

The food itself was also… underwhelming. The buffet or one of the places on the Quays would have been a far better fit for us. It filled a hole, I suppose, and kept us going until the evening and our dining plans for then.

We grabbed our books for a read in the atrium where we could be near enough to the Glass House to grab some wine if the urge took us (it usually does), and that’s where we saw some of the aerial acrobats practising their skills for shows that I believe they put on in the Sky Dome. Since we only ever rushed through the Sky Dome when there was any kind of musical performance going on – terrible acoustics, unpleasant humidity thanks to the pool – I can’t be sure on this.

There was a video here, but now there isn’t.

Bats And The Beach House

This evening gave us another new place to try out, but ahead of that we thought it would be nice to take a wander outside just after sunset. The temperature was nice, and we had a nice surprise to go with it as we suddenly saw a bat flying over our heads. We watched it for several minutes before I thought to grab my phone and see if I could catch any of its promenade deck laps. Just about. Ah, we do love bats. We have bats that fly up and down our garden at home, and it was lovely to see another one – maybe the same one! You don’t know! – out here in the Bay of Biscay with no sign of land anywhere.

There was also a video here, but now there isn’t.

The Beach House is P&O’s Caribbean-style dining location, present in some form or another on several ships in its fleet. We’d not been to one before because our cruises on P&O had been short and the food associated with the Caribbean isn’t one that we’ve ever found attractive, but since we’d tried Sindhu already – and that’s another style of food we don’t care much for – we thought it was worth giving this place a try. The good thing about a cruise and even paying a little extra for some speciality dining on some nights is that if you don’t like it, you’re still going to be able to find somewhere to get something else to ensure you don’t go hungry.

Like most of the design choices aboard Iona, the Beach House touches of pastel accent colours and bleached wood was subtle, trying to hit the target of Sophisticated, but landing short in Bit Bland, Mate. As for the food, though: it was okay. I might even go so far as to say I liked what I had, even if to my wife is was tolerable; just about acceptable. She has less adventurous taste buds than me, and mine aren’t exactly the Indiana Jones type.

We finished that evening off back in the Club House. Unfortunately, the comedian from earlier in the week was there again, but it was a different set, and while not terribly good or original in our opinion, at least eschewed the sort of dated jokes we’d suffered through previously.

The Keel And Cow, And Live Music On Iona

Our penultimate night aboard P&O Iona would hit the last of the additional charge restaurants on the ship, but ahead of that we spent the day wandering around and taking photos (they make up the bulk of the pictures in the second part of this Iona cruise series of posts), winning another quiz (we were getting quite giddy with all the wins), and having a quick lunch in the Quays area of the ship. This was where you could pick up American diner food, traditional fish and chips, or Asian fusion offerings at different times of the day. We went traditional here, and yes, this was very good. And complimentary, too!

Next to the Keel And Cow for the evening meal. This location was at the top of the atrium, so a buzz of noise was to be expected, but it’s one that suits the mood of what’s on offer. As you can probably guess from the name, you can anticipate meat (plenty was hanging up so you could view the various cuts) as well as whatever Iona has rammed and impaled in the ocean. P&O describe the place as a gastropub, and it does some reasonable beer there.

It wasn’t just a general white noise of conversations drifting up through the space and restaurant staff clanking plates, though, as we were treated to an unscheduled performance by the on-board shanty group below us. With our table right against the balcony we got an unusual view of the musicians.

There was a video here, but now there isn’t.

The food – we both went for the fillet steak to compare it with Princess Cruises – was served with a side-holder containing onion rings and sauces. Yeah, Princess have nothing to worry about here, but that’s not to say that the food was bad; far from it. Very nice, not too extortionate an upcharge on what the cruise is already costing, and nice enough, and with a large enough menu, that we decided we’d come back the following night too.

After dinner we thought we’d see whether we could get into the Limelight Club after that evening’s show. It’s a place that opens up for live music late at night but it’s not the largest of venues and even on our cruise on Iona – I’ve mentioned this before – at half-capacity this had not been possible on any of the other nights. We got lucky on this occasion, though, so got to have a drink and hear some more from the fabulous Limelights.

There was a video here, but now there isn’t.

We finished the evening, as usual, in the Club House, and we caught a little of singer Laura Miller belting out some tunes. A good voice and a fancy frock. What else do you need?

There was a video here, but now there isn’t.

The Last Day On Iona

The final day of your cruise is a sad time because no matter what the cruise has been like, it’s better than being at work, right?

Hmmm.

Well, we certainly used to think that way, and I suppose we still do believe those words to be true, but to compare this particular cruise on Iona in a way that most veteran cruisers may understand, we were not disappointed that the holiday was coming to an end. There was none of that usual downturned lower lip and the putting-off of the packing away requirement. Circumstances definitely played a part. These were the Pandemic Times. However, we’d not felt like this on our other cruises in the months prior to this and we definitely didn’t feel like this on the cruises afterwards. Iona felt soulless, lacking vitality. A week on her with no ports stretched out that dull existence too far.

But, getting back to our last day on this ship…

An important part of this last day was exchanging our prize-winning stamps for a prize or prizes. When you’re used to winning pens and coasters and bottle-stoppers over and over and over again on a Princess ship then this is an area where P&O knocked it out of the park. A great system, offering different and very good quality prizes. We are now the proud owners of a P&O Cruises tumbler.

Our last evening meal on the ship was a second visit to the Keel And Cow to try out some of the other dishes on offer, as previously mentioned. Oof! Look at the size of that sausage!

We had no plans for a late night but still wanted to pay one last visit to the Club House for a final drink and to enjoy some music. A lot of people aboard clearly felt similarly about the first part of that as it wasn’t very busy in there when we turned up and it emptied out fairly rapidly after we arrived. You can see how empty the place was in the photos below, and that’s important, because I have a bad experience to impart to conclude this cruise on Iona.

Look. A dozen or so of us. Let’s say twenty of us, spread out around the entire space. Bar staff and waiters amounted to about the same so we could all have had one member of staff with us at all times to ensure we weren’t getting dehydrated. Obviously, we didn’t. It would’ve been awkward, to be fair. However, you might have imagined that staff might be on the ball, ready to assist at a moment’s notice, keeping an eye out on the passengers, giving them if not undivided, then certainly priority attention. After finishing some drinks we pushed the empty glasses to the edge of our table, making sure they and us were in clear view of the bar and all the staff gathered there, having a chat. And another waiting game began. After five minutes of not seeing one glance in our direction I pulled out my phone and started the timer on it. When the timer reached twenty minutes I walked up to the DJ booth.

“Hi, here for a request?”

“I certainly am!” I replied, holding up the still-running timer on the phone. “Do you think you could get Anyone From The Bar to play Let’s Serve That Couple Over There please?”

Give the DJ his due, he almost sprinted to the bar area to send someone our way. The member of staff appeared put-out that we’d interrupted their chat and the whole incident didn’t put us in mind to hang around any longer so we took that drink with us to our room. Just terrible service from P&O to finish of a generally disappointing cruise all round.

Iona: Conclusions

I’ve already summarised the good and bad points about Iona in this series so I’m not going to repeat myself.

That’s the end of the accounts of this week at sea on Iona. I swear we wanted to like it more than we did and, as you can see, there are nice elements to the ship and to the food and entertainment we experienced. It just doesn’t have a place in our hearts. If you’re going to cruise on Iona for the first time then I have no doubt that you’ll have a vastly different time aboard because you’re not me, you might be more easily-impressed, the world’s not the world it was, and you’ll just get more or less out of different things.