The cruise to Norway aboard Britannia in May 2023 was our first – and at the time of writing this, only – cruise aboard P&O‘s flagship, Britannia. The first day away from port was a sea day and therefore the perfect time for a bit of a walk around the open decks and interior venues to take some photos of the ship.
I have eased off taking pictures on the cruise ships over the years – not that you’d really be able to tell if you took a look through my cruise history photos here or elsewhere online – as we’ve cruised on some ships or with some lines often enough that there’s little new to see, and even with some new-to-us cruising experiences, once you’ve cruised a lot you tend to see the same things over and over again and it’s nicer to just enjoy it rather than try to capture it all. However, Britannia is P&O’s only Royal-class design of ship so I was keen to see how it compared to other ships in the P&O fleet and to the similar class that Princess operate.
Some pictures of the top deck of the cruise ship to start with, simply because I made sure to take my camera with me when we left the room for breakfast in the buffet. It was a little overcast to start with and with this being the North Sea in May, it wasn’t very warm, hence the lack of many other people around.
One of the things we’d seen in photos of Britannia from years ago was a lot of straight lines in the decor and design, although we knew she’d had a refurbishment that had tried to round and soften some of that. On the top deck you could still see a lot of straight edges and symmetrical layout, but it worked there. The huge deckchair – a staple feature of P&O cruise ships – was also present.
You can’t take photos from the top deck of a cruise ship without making sure that there’s a wake view in there, somewhere. Everyone likes that ship’s wake.
Inside Britannia it was easier to spot more flow and curving elements in the furnishings and layout. There’s no doubting that Britannia’s design was very stylish across every venue we ventured into even if the darker colours sometimes made a place feel a little claustrophobic when the designers were possibly looking for cosy.
Britannia’s atrium was a lot better than older photos of it showed, and the central art piece was nicely abstract, but the layout and design of the decks around it with those thick pillars kept bringing to mind a sort of shopping mall from the 1990s feel. To be fair, though, we rarely hang around the atrium areas of any cruise ship, largely because the space makes them so very noisy and completely at odds with the relaxation we’re after when we travel by sea. Good for five minutes of people-watching, sometimes, but for us it’s a hub to get to better places – well, hopefully – and not somewhere to hang out.
A large point of booking a balcony for us is that it does give us the perfect spot to relax, soak in those sea views, and not get deafened by music and tens of dozens of people trying to hold audible conversations over that deafening music. With our slow amble around the outside and inside of Britannia done, and once we’d judged we’d given our room steward enough time to clean our cabin, we returned to it for a cup of tea with the sea air, our books, and one another for company. The morning’s cloud cover had disappeared but the sun was behind us and our balcony was in the shade so it wasn’t the warmest place to be, but still fabulous.
We don’t do an awful lot on sea days normally but prior to this cruise on Britannia we’d booked the additional cost Afternoon Tea at the Epicurean. We’d had this before on P&O and enjoyed it – although Virgin still wins the cruise line afternoon tea prize for us, I’m afraid – and it was good, but it wasn’t quite as good as we remembered. Some people on a table near us had some allergies that needed to be catered for and that seemed like that took an awful long time to resolve for them, leaving them sitting like lemons while we and others made our way through the food selections and teas. Yes, of course we had a glass of fizz with it. We were on holiday, I’ll have you know.
The afternoon tea filled us up nicely enough that we decided to forego dinner in the main dining room. Cruise lines like to put their formal nights on sea days if they can so this saved us having to dress up too smartly, although we were then limited to certain bars and lounges. That was okay with us, though, and we spent a bit of time in The Live Lounge being entertained by P&O’s house band, Pulse, performing a mix of songs from the 1970s.
The video below includes a little bit of Pulse performing Car Wash and a little bit of the conga line that formed while Love Train was played.
We grabbed a bite to eat in the late-night buffet, just because we could and it had now been long enough for that afternoon tea to weigh less heavily in our tummies, then called it a night.
In the next post in this Britannia cruise travelogue series we’ll be making our first stop in Norway when we arrive at Stavanger for the first time in nearly ten years.