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.

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.