The first part of this series covering our week-long cruise aboard P&O Cruises‘ newest ship (at the time), Iona, went through the embarkation process, the stupid drinks package process, and the first couple of evenings on the ship as it headed down towards the Bay of Biscay to chase the sunshine. We even got to eat at the very elegant Sindhu restaurant for the first time; probably the last time too, although that’s no reflection on anything other than our personal dining tastes. If you’d like to read about that first part before diving straight into this second part then now’s your big chance to do so: A Week’s Cruise On Iona: Part 1.
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.