Seacation Cruises For Summer And Beyond

Cruise lines have had a rough year, from early, unjustified vilification by the gormless masses to more recent wrangling in the US between the CDC (looking out for the health of people; albeit in an inconsistent, slow, and often puzzling manner) and certain US senators (looking out for their share portfolios and allegiance to conspiracy theories over science). Ships have sailed in Europe and beyond with hundreds of thousands of passengers cruising with no problems and only a few handfuls of reported cases of Covid, and that during a period prior to the welcome onslaught of vaccines being produced. Where cruise lines have been given the green light to get to sea and prove they’re safe they’ve jumped at the chance to do so, and luckily for us in the United Kingdom, and due in no small part to the brilliant work of the NHS, we’re included. Seacation cruises – that’s UK-based cruises, perhaps stopping at a couple of home ports, perhaps just cruising around in the hoped-for sunshine (good luck) – are suddenly popping up everywhere.

We want to have a proper holiday this year, but we want to do so as safely as possible and with the best chance that whatever we book will actually go ahead. The cancellation-after-cancellation of last year started to grate after a while.

Although Europe’s making great strides now in ramping up vaccine production, there’s still a long way to go there (not helped by unjustified scaremongering about adenovirus-based treatments thanks to wilful misrepresentation and misunderstanding of statistical probabilities) and their timing of vaccinations with current so-called third waves on the continent means the reduction in infected numbers won’t be as swift as it was here at home. We got lucky in that our vaccine release coincided with a new lockdown that was already pointing the R-number downwards so got a cumulative boost in breaking transmission rates. That timing issue’s also why the US programme of vaccinations, despite the high volume, is likely to be a more drawn-out affair before precautions can really be lifted, and why the CDC is right to be cautious over there.

So, Europe as a destination in the coming months is still a bit risky; any country could be put on the UK’s red list at a moment’s notice. Elsewhere in the world has the same problem. What does that all leave for us, then?

Option one is to do nothing, and you know what Jack Nicholson thinks about all work and no play. Option two is to try a UK land break. Christ. Chances of finding something half-decent and not requiring an extension to the mortgage to book it are already slim. So, the third option of the seacations gives us the best chance to get a real break away from last year, having the sort of holiday we enjoy the most, in a safe environment, with the least possibility of suddenly finding ourselves needing to quarantine or seek out (and pay for) a last-minute test. The cruises we’ve looked at will all run on ships at reduced capacity, with staff having been tested and quarantined, all guests required to be fully-vaccinated, and mostly just spent at sea, with lots of lovely, fresh air. How could we not look at all the offerings and look at all our un-booked annual leave and look at all our credit from previous cancellations and say “Let’s go crazy and hope!”

We went crazy. We’re now hoping.

The first three cruises above are true cruises to nowhere.

We’re starting with three days on Regal Princess out of Southampton, bimbling along the coast before returning. If you’ve read our reviews of our time on Regal’s sister ship, Royal Princess (you can find them all here: Royal Princess, Europe, 2016) then you’ll know that we didn’t have the greatest of times aboard, although that was mostly down to the staff on that cruise. It happens. There were also some things we didn’t like about the ship (tiny balconies and some venues) but some we did (adults pool was fabulous), so we’re approaching Regal with an open mind. We’ll have a small balcony – it can’t be helped – but it’ll be brief and we’re going to bloody love not being stuck on land.

Next is another three days but this time on Scarlet Lady out of Portsmouth. When we saw the reviews from the media junkets ahead of the ship’s proposed launch almost two years ago it would be fair to say that we weren’t just underwhelmed, our whelm levels were firmly in the negative. We’re talking anti-whelmed here. We didn’t like the standard rooms with their weird beds and broom-closet approach to toilet facilities. We didn’t like the bathtub pretending to be a swimming pool. We didn’t like the anticipated price point. We didn’t like the targeting of young, healthy, wealthy people (because we’re none of those things, it’s true, but commercially it looked like a suicidal business model). We didn’t like some of the attitudes of staff and the company that came through in some of the reviews after the event. But fast-forward to the last couple of weeks and, well… Weekender cruise from ten minutes’ walk away from our house? Sensible price with very generous on board credit that brings the Rockstar suite price in line with a simple balcony offering on Princess? A slightly older demographic than planned because of the requirement for full vaccination? We were almost compelled to book this. I’ll moan about the booking process as part of the full review, should we truly get to cruise on Scarlet Lady, but for the rest of it, surprisingly, we’re actually really excited about seeing how she is and what a genuine Virgin Voyages cruising experience is like when compared to those Scarlet Night press freebie preview events and other cruise lines in general.

The last of the non-stop cruises is longer, with a week aboard P&O Cruises’ Iona, again, like all the others now, out of and returning to Southampton. The week will see us cruise around the Channel Islands then head down the French coast towards Spain and back, to do some sun-chasing according to their Twitter people and not to do some storm-chasing in the Bay of Biscay which we’d indicated as a preference. Maybe we’ll finally get to book a table at a Sindhu’s restaurant aboard a P&O ship.

Those first three cruises are all about a fortnight apart – UK cruising requires a week between cruises, although quite how all the different lines are coordinating this information is anyone’s guess – but the next two for the year have gaps of a month before and between them.

At the end of September we’ll be boarding Sky Princess for the first of two cruises on her within a year. This one was originally slated to stop at Belfast and Liverpool, the first of which would be new to both of us (port and country) and the latter being somewhere we’re far more familiar with, though not in a cruising capacity. Since booking, however, an additional port stop at Portland has been added so we might get a chance to see some more of the area that we didn’t manage during our visit to Weymouth last year.

The last cruise we’ve got booked for 2021 is one we’ve had booked for a while now, and that’s an older and smaller ship in P&O’s fleet, Arcadia (the only ship in this cruising list we’ve cruised on before; see: Arcadia, Europe, 2018). Should it go ahead, then we’ll be cruising through some of Norway’s fjords en route to the Arctic Circle and a hunt for the Northern Lights. We’ve seen them before but they’re not something you’d ever tire of.

That just leaves one more cruise we’ve got booked and that’s to coincide with my wife’s birthday next year. We often cruise around my birthday because it’s in September and we like to know that kids are back in schools and less likely to be aboard when we travel, so it’s nice to have something arranged for her for once. We’ll be on Sky Princess again, hitting part of Norway again, but then scooting across to Iceland. We’re fond of Iceland but have never visited it on a cruise ship, and we’ve never visited it during summer months when midnight sunshine can be expected.