This post will mainly serve as a set of notes for when I get around to writing up about the cruise properly, hopefully some time before the universe has cooled, but no promises. It might also be informative for anyone wondering how Britannia compares to the other ships in the P&O fleet; at least, as far as we’re concerned.
We’ve just returned from a week on the P&O Cruises ship Britannia. This was a cruise that took us from Southampton to Stavanger, then Nordfjordeid, then Flåm, then Haugesund, before returning to Southampton. Two of those ports were ones we’ve cruised to before, although that was on Crown Princess in 2013, and the other two, by a process of elimination, were new to us. We’d booked this only a couple of months earlier because the timing, pricing, and fact that this would be a ship we’ve not cruised on before and two new ports worked well for us, even if it also meant we’d be cruising during half term and likely to encounter that most irritating of things: parents with kids.
What We Liked About Britannia
Ooh, get me! Mentioning something positive to start! Did I catch some weird brain disease in Norway?
We liked that even though Britannia was a Royal-class ship and was constructed around the same time as both Royal and Regal Princess, there were a few surprising layout differences on board. We’d expected decor changes, of course, but the Crow’s Nest and Epicurean involved some fairly hefty changes to become accustomed to.
We liked that a few of the bars had drinks menus specific to them with a few unique cocktails listed. Nowhere near enough – if you were potentially thinking that you might try all the drinks on offer over the course of your cruise without going crazy each night then you’d still be done by day two – but at least there was some effort. This was a marked improvement over what you can expect on Azura and Ventura.
Despite this being a full cruise with lots of kids, we found they were mainly unnoticeable and the buffet still had space in which to eat most days, whether for breakfast or lunch (we didn’t try dinner there). We can’t honestly say what the quality of entertainment for kids was like on this cruise but there seemed to be plenty for them to do and we saw queues outside children’s activity venues most days.
The shower in the cabin was large and had a glass door.
The staff and service. We’ve heard a few cruise bloggers and their followers mention that P&O can be a bit cool, standoffish, or unfriendly when compared to other cruise lines, and we’ve seen that to some extent on our previous cruises with P&O too. However, there was a surprisingly high amount of friendly chat, joking about, and useful information offered up freely on Britannia on this cruise. Service is never perfect but the good and excellent far outweighed the bad this time around.
Chesney Hawkes in the Limelight Club was superb.
What We Didn’t Like About Britannia
Ooh, get me! Ranting on about the negative things far more than the positive! Did I receive fast-acting treatment for the weird brain disease I caught in Norway?
Our cabin – C621, since you asked – was a masterclass in taking a successful design on the precursor Grand-class ships and feeding it into an Encrappifying Machine. We’ve come to expect some standard features in a cruise ship cabin and, for some unholy reason this expectation just wasn’t met. Bedside cabinets? No. Bedside cabinet. Just the one, and that on the side of the bed with no nearby plug sockets. The other side of the bed was close to the long desk with a shallow drawer containing a bible and hairdryer. The plug socket that was there fought for space with the phone socket and attached phone, making the desk space even less useful. Obviously, with only one bedside cabinet there was no need for two bedside lamps, but there wasn’t even one. No reading light at all. Everyone has light, or nobody does. And switching the light on for the walk-in closet area by the bathroom also switched on many lights in the main area too. Fabulous dumbassery.
That big shower ate into the space in the bathroom leaving it feeling awfully cramped. “But, Mark, just how much space do you need to stand and pee, and clean your teeth? Not at the same time,” I hear you wail into a rolled-up newspaper. Yes, I get that, but emerging from the shower to dry off involved a forward step, shuffle around the toilet rim, and closing of the shower door to get into that tiny space. It felt… well… naff.
There was a surprising amount of movement on Britannia given the wind and sea conditions. Those conditions weren’t great at times, admittedly, but we’ve been in worse and felt less. Now, we like it when ships lurch and sway and shudder as if they’re running over a whale, but we thought Britannia should have handled it better.
Food and drink quality was way below average. This mostly might just be a matter of timing here, something specific to our cruise and the staff aboard, but we suspect not and I’ll mention it anyway. A pina colada from the pool deck that we started our cruise with was so artificial-tasting and quick-to-separate that it rapidly became revolting, and the cocktails elsewhere didn’t set the world on fire either. The food, though, was arguably perfect if this cruise had been promoted as A Festival Of Dry. One piece of salmon for one dinner was done correctly, and everything else – toast, eggs, beans, cakes, cookies, potatoes, meat, vegetables, whatever – had textures that suggested they’d been under heat lamps for hours before serving. Scrambled eggs at breakfast were good if you got to a new tray in the first four minutes it was put out. Even the speciality dining at the Epicurean fell foul to being not that special.
Food variety was poor again. The breakfast was mostly unchanging, incredibly basic, and often involved checking out at least two of the duplicated stations in the buffet area to find all the foodstuffs available because management of the levels wasn’t all it could be. That extended to the tea and coffee self-service area too when we often found that of the cups, teabags, hot water, milk, and clean spoons required to make a drink, at least one would be unavailable and necessitate a hunt for the missing item elsewhere. The meals in the Main Dining Room were unimaginative and repetitive.
The virtual queue system for the dining rooms and the Glass House was just atrocious. It needs to die a death. So many people were walking around with buzzers because there is literally nobody on this planet or any of the other Earths across the Multiverse who wants to spend a sizeable portion of every evening refreshing the screen on their phone to see if by some miracle the queues aren’t full or if your turn has come around during the small window when you actually managed to join it. The Glass House virtual queue was full every minute of every day of this week on the cruise so we never ate there; it was still reading as full when we saw the place was half-filled on the final evening after leaving the dining room so well done P&O for losing a bit of money there. We spoke to some first-time cruisers who mentioned how much they’d enjoyed everything except having to keep looking at their phone all evening just to get a table for dinner and that there was no easy way to communicate with other members of their family on board.
Whether you call them lifts or elevators, we can all agree on one thing: the lifts on Britannia were terrible. Some were frequently out of service. One time, after a ridiculously long wait with no indication any lift was ever going to come to our floor at all a lift suddenly binged and opened its doors. We stepped in on deck 12, pressed the button for 16, and waited for it to send us to deck 5 and promptly stop working.
Norwegian Cruise Itinerary
We generally liked this itinerary because it covered a lot of bases for us, but there’s a caveat to come.
Booking the cruise fairly late and wanting to keep spending down a bit, we decided not to book any excursions in any port, and just opted to see what we could see off the ship.
Stavanger was first, and this ended up checking off the social and historical and cultural aspects of Norway for us. Cruise ships dock right beside the attractive old town area of Gamle Stavanger which we wandered through before buying tickets to visit the museums: the printing and canning museum ticket also covered admission to the nearby maritime museum. We’d heard that the canning museum was boring and, yes, we could see that might be what you’d think if you looked around on your own. There are audio guides available, but we were lucky to bump into an employee who asked if we wanted a free guided tour and this proved to be excellent. That’s the way to visit that. We spent several hours in those museums before wandering more of the city, enjoying the colourful street of Fargegaten and the street art around, and popping in a bar for a drink.
Nordfjordeid was sadly cancelled. Ships can only drop four lines to hold them at the port beside the floating pontoon but the wind gusts exceeded the safety limit for Britannia. Instead, we were treated to a slow cruise down the Nordfjord and the Innvikfjord that we watched from our room, occasionally popping outside onto the balcony to take photos while wrapped in multiple layers and wishing we’d brought gloves. It was freezing, but beautiful.
We had one plan in Flåm, and that was to visit the brewery we’d been to a decade earlier. We did that, drank loads, chatted to other tourists, and bumped into some other cruise bloggers there too, but before that we spotted a distant waterfall from our balcony when we docked so thought it might be nice to see how close we could get to it on foot for some photos. That waterfall turned out to be Brekkefossen and there turned out to be a hiking trail to it. We are not fit people but we attempted it, with sweaty, achy, heart-pounding, breathless success for me before coming back down to recover alongside my wife who’d sensibly stopped part of the way up (as did other people).
Haugesund completed the cruise itinerary and it was on paper and on first viewing the least inspiring of the ports so something that should be scheduled earlier if possible so as not to finish a cruise with Norway’s Exciting Showcase of Industrial Buildings. That’s still true, but there were some interesting things to see, one of which was historically very significant, and we ended up walking an eight kilometre route that more-or-less matched that taken by the hop-on-hop-off bus or highlights land train. Haugesund was better than we first thought, but a one-and-done stop for us with nothing obvious left to explore should we return.
So, we ticked off great landscapes, a hike, history, culture, art, drinking, and scenic fjords cruising on this Britannia cruise, but what’s the caveat? Well, Flåm, the arguably biggest draw, is going to become a rare visit in a few years time when the heritage fjords restrictions come into effect and only zero-polluting vessels are allowed to cruise there. That probably means that somewhere like Haugesund features more on cruise itineraries and, well, there’s not enough there, and it’s not terribly attractive. That’s got some interesting potential knock-on implications for Norway as a cruise destination in general, and for ships that currently have to use Norway heavily because of their own fuel requirements.
Overall, a tiring break because we walked a lot (because we didn’t do excursions), but a good one that mostly saw us experiencing new things and sights. Britannia isn’t our favourite P&O cruise ship, but she’s certainly not the worst either. Full travelogue posts will appear on this site… eventually.