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.

This cruise was still taking place during a period of heightened pandemic precautions so there was the pre-cruise testing to get through first, but this was an absolute breeze. We drove to the testing centre to find there were barely any cars there at all – a benefit of being the only ship from the Carnival line sailing out of Southampton that day – so we were directed straight through to the marquee, got swabbed, and were on our way with hardly time to slow the car to a stop. The terminal experience was a joy too, with us walking in, being directed to a counter, and them having our medallions ready to go when we got there without even asking our names. In fact, this part was spookily good because we had, and still have, no idea how they knew it was us. Maybe they’d put tracking devices on us when we were on Regal Princess earlier in the year? Weird. But good weird.

Thus it was that by just after midday, we were on the ship. Our cabin – B737 – was an aft-facing balcony. We’d not been able to pick the room we wanted but had selected the grade and been allocated this space. The room itself was exactly what we’d come to expect from a cabin on most cruise ships, but what we very much liked about this particular room was the size of the balcony.

We do like a good balcony. The aft design of these Royal-class cruise ships includes a tapered balcony structure so there was some opportunity for other cabins to overlook us but for this deck of rooms the balcony was half-covered, meaning it could be used even in unpleasant weather (or to get some respite from the sun) or you could perform naked lunges in the open air with only the seagulls as witnesses. Not that we ever did anything like that. I swear.

The decks above and below us had no covered space at all, and that included the suites on the corners. This pattern of partly-covered and fully-exposed balconies at the ship’s rear appeared to be every other deck, so consider this if you’re booking an aft balcony on Sky Princess or one of her sister ships.

The view from our balcony while in port was, well, Southampton. Southampton is never going to win any prizes in the Most Attractive Cruise Port category of whatever ceremony chooses to dish out awards to ports (I guarantee there’s at least one; the travel industry is very big on self-congratulations and promotions). Still, if you’re looking at Southampton from a cruise ship then you know there are good times ahead, and not just because you’ll soon be leaving the city, although that is a big part of it.

Muster drills these days are mercifully easy. The days of suddenly having to grab your life jacket part-way through the afternoon and trudge into a packed venue to sit through safety instructions has been consigned to history on Princess ships. Now, thanks to the medallions tracking you, you can stick the safety video on in the room while you unpack (I mean pay attention to the important information), mark you’ve watched it, then head to your muster station so they can confirm you know where to go in an emergency, and that’s it. Leaves more time for exploring and drinking on your embarkation day. These are much more fun activities.

A good boarding experience helps to set the tone for a cruise, and, so far, our first impressions of Sky Princess were very positive. We were also seeing the medallions working in a way they hadn’t on Regal Princess, with our room unlocking from quite a distance as we approached the door, and with us being able to use the app and see that it was far more accurate in identifying where we were on the ship.

We don’t usually get on a ship as early as we had boarded Sky Princess as it’s just not that important to us. I know there are some people who simply have to get on early; even some people who will ignore when they should be boarding just to be able to get on the ship. That last lot are wankers. So, while it’s never been a thing that’s concerned us before, this early start to our week at sea did mean that we’d have a chance to get some lunch for a change, and, as we hit the central area of the ship – the Piazza – we saw that the Alfredo’s Pizzeria had plenty of seating free. Why not?

Service was admittedly sluggish, but this was embarkation day with lots of people coming and going, and likely a reduction in staff in certain areas to allow others to assist with those boarding, so we were fine with it. Besides, it’s not like we had anywhere we needed to be. The food was very good, and the wine was perfectly fine.

We’d chosen wine to go with our Italian lunch because that felt like the right thing to do, but one thing my wife likes to do very early on a Princess cruise (and then fairly frequently throughout) is have a Dirty Banana cocktail. If you’ve not had one and you are about to cruise with Princess Cruises at some point then make this something to do too. I went for something a little more grown-up, but, as you can see, fruit was included. This means it was healthy.

Southampton Sailaway

It eventually came time for the ship to cast off. We decided to order a glass of something sparkling each in order to sit on our balcony and watch the grey sight of Southampton disappear in our wake. Ordering drinks to the room is very easy on a Princess ship – you can use the phone app, or you can use the TV in the room – but it’s an area that still could use improvement for passengers on the Princess Plus package – this is the small daily charge that includes tips, really good internet access, and up to fifteen drinks per day, and yes, we always get it – because there was no way to order for both of us in one go. If there are two people in a room then each has to order separately otherwise one of the drinks gets charged. It’s, quite frankly, an unnecessary faff. A minor irritation that you get used to, but still an irritation that could easily be addressed.

Our drinks turned up ridiculously quickly. In fact, as we very soon realised on this Sky Princess cruise, ordering to the room, whether food or drink or a combination of the two, was by far the quickest way to get anything. You could easily wait over twenty minutes in a bar, whereas the same thing might be in your room in under five.

I rightly mock Southampton for its grim appearance, but that’s commercial ports for you the world over. Despite everything, I am a fan of industrial architecture designs, and you’ll be able to find many occasions on this website where I rave about brutalism to back that up, so I do enjoy the grain silos that are the last big things to see as your cruise ship starts its run down the Solent and out to sea.

All that remains to describe of this first evening aboard Sky Princess is what we ate and drank, and where we were entertained.

We actually ate in one of the main dining rooms on Sky Princess, and this felt like quite a novelty. In fact, it had been around two years since we’d last done this, with all the cruises of 2021 to date taking place in speciality dining venues: Virgin’s Scarlet Lady didn’t have the concept of normal dining rooms, and on both Regal Princess and Iona we’d booked in for something special on each night. I have to say that we really enjoyed the main dining room experience a lot, helped, I think, by there being fewer people aboard than on a normal cruise, and the concept of sharing tables having been knocked aside for the most part. We would end up in the main dining room several times on this cruise, and the only issue we had was that we found booking a table for two impossible on the app or TV; as soon as the pair of us were selected, the option to pick a time became disabled. Shakes fist at technology! We worked out, though, that we could book a table for one, so ended up doing that, and just turning up when due, on the basis that they wouldn’t try to allocate us to a tiny table facing the wall somewhere or refuse the pair of us entry. That seemed to work fine.

A venue on Sky Princess, not on other ships we’d been on prior to this, that we wanted to check out, was Take Five. Confusingly located on deck six, this was the jazz lounge. Live acts performed in the evening and there was a jazz jukebox to select tunes from during the day, but it also had a fantastic selection of cocktails that we felt obliged to sample. This would end up being our place to go most evenings. Great atmosphere, fabulous staff, lovely drinks.

So, not a lot to report on for this first day aboard Sky Princess, but in the next part of this cruising travelogue series we’ll be docking at Portland near Weymouth under clear blue skies, and there will be a wander around the ship (plenty of photos), an afternoon tea, and another sailaway video to share.

If you remember from the first post in this Sky Princess cruise travelogue series, we had an aft cabin, and the morning view that greeted us in Portland was of the Dorset coastline towards Lulworth Cove.

Once a reasonably late breakfast was out of the way we went for a wander around the top deck of the ship just to see how different this Royal-class ship was to the other ones in the Princess fleet on which we’d cruised. Our experiences aboard Royal Princess (in 2016) and Regal Princess (earlier in the year) had confirmed that, the lack of a Skywalkers aside, the upper decks of these ships was a good design, featuring plenty of pools and an especially-improved adults only pool near the front. But we also knew that the Royal-class ships had undergone some design changes with their newer vessels and wanted to see if these were improvements in our minds or not.

We started at the aft of the ship as it was close to our room, and the following photographs show the aft pool on Sky Princess as well as some of the outside fitness areas: the jogging track and court.

As we moved forward along the top deck of Sky Princess it was nice to look at some of the Portland landscape that we’d not quite reached when we’d walked along some of the South West Coast Path on our prior visit. Our legs had only taken us into part of the walled harbour area in which the cruise ship was anchored but the hill to the ship’s port side was on the Isle of Portland and we’d never quite got off the mainland.

I like a bit of art and we started encountering some sea-themed and Princess-themed pieces around this part of the ship. In keeping with the overall cruise line colours, blue and white featured a lot, and that’s nice but I think it can be bolder to go vibrant and contrasting where such pieces are concerned. At least if you were ever concerned that you couldn’t remember which hashtag to use on social media there was a handy reminder to be found.

The swimming pools are some of the biggest draws for us on a cruise ship, although for other people, being near a swimming pool, taking up space around a swimming pool, and preventing those who want to swim in the swimming pool from having anywhere to put their stuff close by is what they most want. Have I mentioned how much I hate people who lounge by pools but never use them are? Yes, yes I have. Sorry, can’t help the odd, repetitive rant.

Princess Cruises do swimming pools pretty well. There are usually plenty on their ships, and they’re usually a decent size. One difference we spotted on the main pool area on Sky Princess was an altered space between the two pools that had previously been reserved for a fountain show, now adding a couple of hot tubs. That felt like a better use of the space.

The adults-only pool on Sky Princess – the Sanctuary or Retreat pool – was quite different from Royal and Regal, and not for the better in my opinion. It’s possible that the design change was to reduce some of the more luxurious lounger areas in order to encourage more use of the additional-cost Sanctuary itself, while also providing some shelter from cross winds, which the earlier iterations of this area had been exposed to. For the latter, if that was the case then I can confirm this has not worked. This day off Weymouth was beset by a strong and rather bitter wind and our experience was that, even stationary at anchor, far from sheltering passengers in this pool area, it served to somehow funnel everything down into it. That didn’t stop us making use of the pool later in the day, but that’s when we encountered another unwelcome change; the Sanctuary pool depth was simply not deep enough for a decent swim. If you weren’t in motion then you needed to crouch down to keep as little of you above the water line and under attack from the wind as possible.

Overall, we would come to love Sky Princess during this week aboard her – handy, with us having future cruises planned on her as well – but the adults pool was a downgrade from earlier Royal-class ships.

After we’d had a swim and freshened up we decided to have a light(ish) lunch in the form of an afternoon tea. Either side of the savoury and sweet nibbles we treated ourselves to some wine, and, as we were inside the ship, took some photos of the air balloons sculpture that decorates the piazza area because that’s the law. If you see someone has been on Sky Princess and has not taken photos of these striped balloons then make sure to report them to the authorities. There’s no place on a cruise ship for people like that.

The early evening saw Sky Princess depart from Weymouth and Portland ahead of a cruise around the coastline towards Northern Ireland. While we’ve never been massively bothered with sail away events on cruises, happy to be in a bar or showering or anything else really, I had decided before this cruise, and due in part to having the aft balcony, that I’d try to video the cruises out of the ports. Thus it was that we found ourselves back in our room and ordering a drink to have on the balcony as the ship left Dorset.

The sun was starting to set as the ship left the harbour, making for some truly wonderful seascapes and skyscapes. Sunsets are best experienced at sea. That’s a fact.

I was very taken by the Portland Breakwater Fort as we cruised past it. Built a few years either side of 1870 to guard the port, the stone structure was laid down on a granite base of a ring sixty one metres in diameter on the seabed. Originally armed with cannons, then replaced with guns, the fort was in use up until the end of the second world war but was finally abandoned in 1956. A listed building to this day, it is sadly not accessible to the public, but looks like it has a huge amount of potential for an investor.

Evening aboard Sky Princess was much like any evening aboard any cruise ship: a little bit of musical entertainment around the ship, dinner (in this case in the main dining room, and very good), and drinks in various bars.

So, a quiet day on Sky Princess for us with not a lot to report, but a lovely and relaxing one, and with the promise of more to come. The next post in this UK cruise travelogue series will cover two days at sea and two evenings of speciality dining before we hit another port and, for both of us, a brand new part of the world to explore.

We relaxed, in a relaxing manner, relaxingishly. Relaxedly. Relax-like. In the manner of people relaxing, like they do.

This post, therefore, is a bit of blurb around the photographs taken on Sky Princess as she cruised from Portland (that’s the previous post in this series) around the British coastline, and up between Wales and Ireland towards Northern Ireland where a first visit to Belfast and that part of the UK awaited us. What photos did I take? Sea views? Yes, because we were at sea. Food? Yes, because we hit two speciality dining venues on these two days. Drink? Yes, of course, because, holy crap, have you read any other post I’ve ever put up?

How do you relax on a cruise? Do you wander into the atrium on the ship and find a seat to have a drink? It looks like we did. The Piazza is what Princess call their atrium area, but because they don’t have glass roofs and because someone went to Italy once and thought it sounded exotic they decided on piazza instead. It fits, especially given that most of the ships are built in Italy and this is the central hub off which you can find all those sorts of things you’d find in any Italian town square: bars, restaurants, a place to people watch, drive-by Mafia shootings, the Pope, Vespas beeping, colourful Minis careering down the stairs, and so on.

We are fond of trivia when we go cruising, and we usually do very well, winning on most cruises. That didn’t happen on Sky Princess and we’re going to blame the venue for quizzing – the Live Lounge – for that. It wasn’t that it was rammed – although it was, every day – or that there’s constant distraction because people keep passing by since it’s open plan and close to a main corridor, but it was the silly Covid restrictions they kept enforcing (or trying to enforce) here. Everywhere on the ship, if you were sitting down, you didn’t need to wear a mask, with two exceptions: the big, spacious Princess Theatre and the big, open plan Live Lounge. If you were in the lounge, sitting quietly, wanting to do a quiz, you were supposed to mask up. If you were sitting across the corridor – where the shot is taken from – and still able to do the quiz, you didn’t need to mask up. I will follow instructions unless they’re stupid. A lot of people ignored the restriction because it didn’t make any sense, and when you’re quizzing it is actually a hell of a hindrance. Leaning in to whisper an answer to a team mate, having that whisper muffled and unaided by lip-reading visual clues: “Did you say you thought the capital of Sierra Leone was Fermmermegh? That’s not a word!” Yeah, we didn’t enjoy the quizzes that much. And that’s why we didn’t win any. It wasn’t because we’re thick. Or drunk. It wasn’t just because of those reasons.

We had what we knew would be filling evening dinner plans for this first sea day so lunch was light, if you also go along with my definition that some beer and wine in Vines is a light meal. It was a good place to listen to the piano and string trio in the piazza.

We went to an art auction in the early afternoon, although you’ll have to take my untrustworthy word for it since I neglected to take any pictures. We still haven’t really forgiven Park West (the people who run these auctions on many Carnival group lines’ ships) for The Incident but we are nosey, and there’s only so much drinking and reading in a day you can do (I lie!) so we thought, why not? We didn’t buy any art at the auction. But… we were invited to the gallery afterwards and given an offer we couldn’t refuse for a sculpture and a piece that would fit our collection. Honestly, it was a stupidly good price.

Early evening on a Princess ship is the time when the Elite Lounge opens up. On Sky Princess this took place in the Vista Lounge. For Platinum and Elite level guests only, this place offers light nibbles of the bread, cheese, and meats variety, plus some exclusive cocktails at discounted prices. Prior to the introduction of the fabulous Princess Plus package which includes up to fifteen drinks per day, this was a way to save a little bit of money on drinks, but its role these days is less exclusive. It’s still nice to go there, and it didn’t stop us trying every drink on the menu. We were on holiday, so you shut your mouth.

You’re going to think we’re weird but one thing we really like to see on cruise ships is rotating light patterns on walls and curtains. We will always pass them by and say “Now, listen to me. Listen to me.” Look, we watch a lot of movies. I’m sure you know which one I’m referring to here.

Dinner on this first sea day was in the excellent Crown Grill speciality restaurant on Sky Princess. We will almost always dine here on a cruise. Yes, it’s a little extra (but so good value for money). Yes, we don’t tend to vary what we have very much at all. It’s just that good. Hit the search on this site (you do know you can search for things off the Content submenu, right?) and look for all the other times we’ve visited the Crown Grill on Princess Cruises ships if you want more information.

If you thought we didn’t do a whole lot of much on the first sea day then just you wait for day two! Which is here now.

We spent a lot of time on our aft balcony on this day, reading and drinking. There are cruisers who absolutely love aft balconies and get all giddy with excitement at being on them, and fair play to them; we’ve all got our thing. We’re a little more ambivalent towards them, preferring to see waves go past the ship and feel more up and down motion with a tilting horizon that you get nearer the front of the ship, but the aft balconies on Sky Princess – especially on our deck (see the first post in this series to find out where that was) – were huge, partly covered, and especially nice. They made for nice sun traps and protected us from the wind which was strong and cold.

If you are a fan of wake views from the aft of a cruise ship then feast your eyes on these photos below.

The Vista Lounge was where we headed again in the evening, though not for the Elite Lounge this time, but the Captain’s Circle Party instead. Another chance for free nibbles, and free drinks as well for all attendees (and you can do very well out of this if you keep catching the eye of staff). This event is a chance for the captain and senior members of the loyalty scheme to boast about the number of people aboard, what’s happening in the fleet, new ships and destinations on the horizon, etc. It’s also a chance for the most-travelled passengers aboard to win some goodies, for everyone to win the chance of a bottle of something, and for photos with the captain for those who want it.

After the Elite Lounge we made our way to Take Five, which, as you can guess from its name, is the jazz lounge on the ship, and which, as you can’t guess from its name, is on deck six. Still annoys me. We did like Take Five a lot, though, and ended up in here pretty every night at some point. Jazz – either from a jukebox or the trio led by Larry King (not that one) on piano – and a wonderful array of cocktails on the menu. Photos and some video of the jazz are below.

And the evening meal for the second of these sea days before Belfast was at wonderful, wonderful Sabatini’s. If you were to ask me to describe Sabatini’s in one word then it would be wonderful, but I’d likely repeat it because it’s really quite wonderful. Again, as with the Crown Grill, there’s a small upcharge and you can tell we visit this venue a lot on Princess ships by making use of the search facility; and you’ll be able to find out more about the restaurant and its menu that way because I’m not repeating it now. I’m just repeating the word wonderful. Wonderful.

The only problem with Sabatini’s is that you really should opt for elective surgery prior to your cruise in order to fit in an additional, elasticated stomach. We didn’t, and tried to fool our bodies into thinking everything was okay and this was another day and please don’t explode by taking a walk onto the ship’s promenade deck for some air. We didn’t explode, but we did decide on an early night.

In the next post in this Sky Princess UK cruise travelogue series I’ll cover Belfast, a city we’d never been to before and which… we still really haven’t since we took an excursion to the north coast to look at the Giant’s Causeway instead. There will be rock formations.