And so we reach the last post in this travelogue series covering our late 2021 cruise aboard P&O Cruises ship Ventura, a cruise we’d decided would be important in determining whether we ever cruised with P&O again before we boarded. Some people like to say things like “Well, read on to find out” and I’m certainly not beyond doing that as well, but in this case I’ll spoil the result and say yes, we will cruise with P&O again. If you’ve not read the first post in this series or previous cruises we’ve taken and covered on this site then you might not know that our experience earlier in the year on P&O’s newest-at-the-time ship Iona had been… disappointing in so many ways. You can read about that cruise here – Iona Seacation – but Ventura happily put right a load of problems we’d encountered, or at least simply suited us better and reinforced that not every cruise ship suits every person, much as the lines would like you to believe otherwise.
So, a very quick summary of the final 36 hours or so aboard Ventura now and then a few more cruising conclusions to, er, conclude.
We had just departed the final port of Vigo in Spain so the penultimate evening promised a drink or two, some food, and some entertainment, as they always do. In fact, we started with some entertainment and with someone who I’ve mentioned a number of times in this travelogue series: Nikki Jayne. Funny, glamorous, and a gorgeous voice with great taste in music.
Not long after we returned from this cruise I posted a video online and tagged Nikki on her Instagram profile. We talked, and I ended up making all the videos and photos I’d taken of her available privately so that she could use them to make a showreel in order to try to secure better jobs within the cruising and general entertainments industry. Not long after that she had been transferred to Iona as the compère and singer at the Limelights Club, and at the time of writing this she’s now on Seabourn Odyssey. Perhaps I helped, but it’s probably all down to her.
To the actual final sea day on Ventura as promised by the title of this post now. If you’d like to see the daily programme of activities aboard the ship then photos are provided below for your eyeballs. Sea days on cruise ships don’t tend to vary very much and after you’ve cruised a few times then you can pretty much guess what’s going on where at any point in the day without the need for one of these guides but you will discover some occasional gems. Not this time, though.
Calm seas accompanied our cruise back to the UK but not a great deal of sunshine. It was November, to be fair.
One thing we did need to do that we’d only previously had to do on one other ship – and that was Iona – was to convert our trivia-winning stamps to actual prizes. This is one area of cruising where P&O is far superior to Princess, our otherwise favourite cruise line. Trivia prizes on Princess are garbage, and they do make fun of them themselves, but it would be nice if they’d raise their game a little there. In the pictures below you can see the list of prizes you could claim and you can see what we got for our stamps.
Picking up our prizes took place earlier on this final sea day than the last trivia and, of course, there was no point collecting stamps for winning that – and win that, we did – so the prize was instead some P&O Cruises-branded wine. You might be wondering what P&O Cruises wine tastes like but I can’t answer that because this bottle is white wine and we have standards regardless of what you might have heard. We offered the bottle to our regular cruise quiz partners who also didn’t drink white wine, but they did have relatives who did so we suggested they take it as a gift for them.
The final dinner, photographed. Food on Ventura was generally good. Nothing outstanding but nothing to complain about either, although our experiences in the speciality dining venues had been great and, again, a marked improvement over the horrible Iona incident.
And, of course, we had to finish the evening listening to some cheesy disco music. When a holiday is good you have to find some way to stretch out every moment of enjoyment for as long as possible, knowing there’s a real world waiting for you back home ready to crush your soul.
The morning saw Southampton welcoming us back to port with a thick blanket of fog. That’s so Southampton.
This Canary Islands cruise on Ventura restored our faith in P&O Cruises. Iona had been such a let-down, but Ventura was back to what we wanted. A familiar feel, a decent-sized ship but not too large, a ship with character rather than something bland, corporate, and soulless. She might not have had the range of drinks and food or the most modern of decor, but she had comfort and proper balconies and swimming pools you could use and friendly staff and enough space for everyone to dine in the dining rooms.
The cruise itinerary was great too. We’d not been to the Canary Islands or Portugal before, and our final port in Spain was a new one for us too. We didn’t get to see our sun observatory thanks to a volcano becoming active and we didn’t get to see Madeira thanks to a medical emergency, but we explored tunnels and visited an aqueduct and reservoirs, and we saw volcanic landscapes, and we had a bloody lovely time.
On the back of this cruise and with a small amount of future cruise credit in our hands still thanks to pandemic cancellations we decided we would cruise with P&O again and booked a week on Ventura’s sister ship Azura in 2023 to tick Croatia off our travel list; we’ll also be popping across the border in Italy to see a bit of Slovenia while we’re there. We can’t wait.