P&O Cruises, Britannia, UK and Ireland Review

Britannia, UK and Ireland

Covid testing excellent, very well organised. Embarking, an absolute fiasco, queing for well over an hour and by the time we were actually on the ship, over two hours. Our acknowledged booking to eat in the restaurant every night, cancelled with no advance notice or reason. The P&O app that isn't an app, but a web page that you have to save or keep running, a complete farce. I proved to a number of fellow travellers, that I could order a meal from the Witherspoons app in a pub on the mainland easier and with more reliability than trying to use the P&O webpage, if it worked and more often than not, it didn't. The virtual queing the reception were so proud of did not work with many people, virtually queing for over an hour only for the web page to drop out and them losing their place in the queue. We spoke to many people, more than a dozen, who had waited more than two hours for a space in the restaurant. The buffet canteen, sorry "Freedom Dining" was mediocre at best with portion sizes aligned to a junior school, but you could go up again as many did.
On the up side, most of the staff were excellent, the ship was very stable, rooms decent and well cared for, plenty of space on deck and the drinks were not stupidly expensive. The inside bar and venue space I think was too
small for the size of the ship with many venuse full and queing to get in.
The majority of my comments were echoed by most, not all, of the people we spoke to and I went to a lot of trouble to tell newbies that this was not representitive and they should try another cruise, perhaps with another line and not to be put off.