P&O Cruise Ship Iona: The Good And The Bad

We are all different people, with different life histories and different genetic make-ups, and, as such, we can all come to wildly different conclusions about the same event or activity based on preconceptions, our previous experiences, and what we generally like or don’t like.

Why am I mentioning this?

Well, it’s to do with why I don’t think anyone should ever be influenced one way or another from a single review of something without at least having some idea of the sort of person doing the reviewing. I know my family and friends, so in that respect I think I could happily recommend or argue against doing something, and they, knowing me, would know whether they trusted my opinion. But the internet is full of strangers. If you don’t know me very well then don’t simply trust what I’m about to say here; and don’t simply trust what someone who says the opposite for the same reason. Try not to fall into the trap of wanting to believe what someone has said because it aligns with what you already felt. I know that’s not easy. We are, sadly, all too human.

So, all of this is leading up to this point. I’m about to put down some short and quick (that’s a relative descriptive term which you’ll understand if you’ve read some of my travelogues on this site before) thoughts concerning our recently-disembarked cruise aboard the P&O cruise ship Iona. For context: we are a couple without children; we have cruised with P&O before (see the cruise menu) but we’d consider ourselves primarily Princess cruisers; we don’t tend to watch a lot of entertainment aboard ships; we like to try all the fancy drinks; we often book speciality dining; we often book excursions; we like quizzes. If you’re the sort of person who’s mainly cruised on car ferries, likes nothing more than bingo and watching music after a morning of yoga, and considers a vodka and tonic as pushing the boat out then there’s every chance that what I write here won’t entirely align with the sort of experience you might have were you to be on the same ship as me.

Right, enough preamble. There will be more in-depth accounts of our week on P&O’s Iona on the website in the near future, but here’s a list we maintained of the good and bad elements of the ship and the cruise line. This was a week aboard Iona, from and to Southampton, passing the Channel Islands and pottering about in the Bay of Biscay for a few days with no port stops.

Iona Pre-Cruise Covid Testing

BAD. This was not a good way to start the cruise and it could so very, very easily have been mitigated. I’m not talking about the need for the test; we’ve had two already on the two cruises prior to this; we’re fine (sort of) with the need for a test. We were given a 13:30 boarding time and we arrived at the right place at 13:20 because people who turn up too early should be shot into the sun. We were directed to a waiting lane where we waited. And waited. And waited. Iona was sailing on the same day as Regal Princess, and as both P&O and Princess are part of the Carnival group they used the same testing location. But Regal was sailing four hours earlier than Iona so it – rightly – got priority. It subsequently took us over three hours to get on the ship. Why were Iona’s tests not scheduled a few hours later to save everyone having to sit around in the sun in their cars on tarmac needlessly?

Iona Balcony Cabin

GOOD. We loved that the bathroom mirror didn’t fog up almost as much as we loved having a dim light on above the shower unit all night so that there was no need to switch the light on if getting up in darkness and risking waking the other half.

The size of the balcony, while not as big as the Grand-class ships of P&O and Princess that we love, was pretty good, and certainly better than the Royal-class ships and derivatives used by both fleets.

BAD. Narrow room. Very tight between end of the bed and the wall, but not as bad as between the side of the bed and the wardrobes. Not very practical.

Not having a mesh inner curtain was a minor additional issue when the sun was shining in as it pushed the ambient heat of the room up noticeably.

Promenade Deck

GOOD. A full wraparound deck is always nice and this one was wide with lots of loungers around and a handful of small tubs or pools. Of course, it had to have lots of loungers around but more on that when I talk about the top deck.

BAD. If you’ve gone for one of those Conservatory Suites on Iona deck 8 then be prepared to have your view be that of people walking past, bathing outside your room, or peering into your room. For us up on deck 12, though, the big problem with the promenade deck was that it was lit up at night, and brightly, and with nothing above it to block that light out. Do you like to sit on your balcony on a cruise ship at night, drink in hand, listening to the waves, watching the stars? We do. We could barely see a thing beyond the floodlit glare beaming up.

Dining On Iona

GOOD. There was good food to be had from the free – The Olive Grove and The Beach House – to the small additional surcharge – The Keel & Cow and The Glass House – and the Quays area, serving up complimentary fish and chips, some American diner food, and Asian fusion food too, was great.

While not exclusively dining, since it included a show, the Limelight Club was absolutely superb. We saw La Voix perform (brilliantly entertaining) and, of course, the resident band, the very excellent Limelights, and that was a faultless evening on Iona.

BAD. We got on the ship at 16:30ish and immediately booked dining through the website accessed through the ship’s Wi-Fi. Good for us, but for people arriving shortly after who we talked to later that day, it seems like we might have just squeezed in before all the bookings were filled. This system of giving those who board first priority booking is just awful. It discriminates against random boarding time assignments and those travelling some distance on the day of the cruise. There has to be a better way of ensuring all guests have equal chance to book at least something.

For the places with no pre-booking, the virtual queue system on the website worked in a fashion if you understand what it’s doing. For example, we wanted to eat at the Keel & Cow. We looked at the website. It wasn’t showing. To us that meant there was no queue so we walked up. Oh no. Not showing apparently meant it was full. I asked how you could tell the difference between “come on in” and “we’re all full” when it not appearing was the same result in both cases. No answer. There’s a simple UI fix here: list all the venues, all the time, with the number of people in the queue, including zero if necessary, or whether it’s presently full. That’s not difficult, surely?

We’ve dined at the Epicurean before (on Azura) and even though that hadn’t been fabulous it had been worthy of the term “speciality dining” and we still had some expectations that were not even close to being met on Iona. Service was glacial. I like relaxed dining but when you’ve been sitting at your table for one hour and ten minutes with just a hard roll, a watermelon shooter, and your starters consumed, then it’s too much. The food overall was barely above the standard of the main dining room, and certainly nowhere near the price point of the meal. But the venue was the worst. We were sat under what I think was an air conditioning unit. It thrummed and rumbled loudly for thirty seconds, sat silently for a minute, then repeated for the entire overly-drawn-out duration. “Can you just confirm to me what that noise is?” I asked a waitress. “Oh, that’s the loungers moving about on the deck above,” she lied.

The Iona Drinks Package

BAD. Yeah, there’s nothing good about this package, but please consider all the points I mentioned at the start of this post before you start thinking “Well, we thought it was great for drinking seven coffees and five pints of lager each day!”

Let’s start with the ridiculous need to add a sticker to the room card. You’ve got an integrated computer system. You don’t need a sticker, surely!? Anyway, P&O want that sticker. Fine. Here’s the thing, then. We arrive at our room. Our room cards are there waiting for us. We enter our room. There’s a letter telling us to take our cards up to a bar beside the Sky Dome to get a sticker. What!? Why didn’t you just put the sticker on the card? Why are you making passengers traipse through the ship to join a long queue to get a sticker? A first-time cruiser in the queue behind us was loudly moaning about this and she was absolutely right. And why aren’t the people who are checking room numbers and names off against their “Yes, these poor suckers bought this P&O drinks package” list being given a list in either alphabetical or numerical order? That pointless queue would move a lot faster if someone doesn’t need to flip through fifteen sheets of paper running his finger down the list each time.

It’s a week’s cruise, and you’re running at below capacity. What is your excuse, P&O, for not having some stock at all (happens every time) but, more importantly, running out of some things just a few days in? I suspect it’s shitty management and cost-cutting and, perhaps, Brexit, but there are so many right-wing twats in cruise circles you can’t possibly suggest that. Even worse than running out of things is when some of the things you run out of are part of the cocktails included in the drinks package, thereby making an already small list of options smaller. Included cocktails? Ah yes…

Our biggest issue with the drinks package on Iona was that this was the first time we’ve got one – our previous cruises weren’t long enough to qualify – and we immediately twigged once aboard that this was a huge mistake thanks to us misunderstanding some arguably deliberately misleading text on the P&O site.

“Nearly every drink we serve is included” and “Say ‘yes’ to an intriguing cocktail” led us to believe that we’d be able to try out lots of cocktails on Iona. We like cocktails. And the gins that you find in Anderson’s on a P&O ship. We were looking forward to them. Yeah, well that plan went tits up immediately. The “Ultimate Drinks Package” costs £40 a day for up to fifteen drinks, up to £7 a drink. How many cocktails does that include? Fuck all. Five maybe across the ship and in all bars, with typically two in any venue. And those gins in Andersons? Nope, because they’re set as double measures. Not only that, but you can’t even simply pay the difference in prices between a £7 and an £8 drink; you get treated to only paying 80% of the full price. Once you add that to what you’re already paying for the daily drinks package you suddenly realise, yeah, this is a complete rip-off and a means to scam passengers out of loads more money. We worked out for one of the drinks that if you had bought the package then it would only become cost-effective if you had 26 of them per day. You’re on the P&O ultimate drinks package and want a couple of coffees in the morning, a glass or two of the cheaper wines in the afternoon, another with dinner, then say, three non-inclusive cocktails in a lounge in the evening? Congratulations, because you’ve potentially just spent close to £60 today for that. So, as a result of buying the drinks package and not wanting to simply throw more money away we restricted ourselves to just the cheapest. Is that what P&O want? For guests to feel they have to restrict what they want? Is that why they ended up running out of certain ingredients? The drinks package is probably fine for beer and basic wine drinkers. It’s in no way at all ultimate. You like a fine wine, you like a cocktail, you like to try those gins? Yeah, avoid like the fucking plague would be my recommendation if I was into recommending things to people I don’t know.

Iona Top Deck And Swimming Pools

GOOD. The infinity pools looked nice.

BAD. There was very little deck space which is why, of course, the promenade deck had loads of spots for people to lounge outside upon. The space that there was, especially around those infinity pools, was rammed with loungers, barely any of which were free because pricks with towels and clothes pegs set alarms for these sorts of things then wander off for hours. I’m firmly of the opinion that 5 minutes is the total amount of time anyone should be allowed to “reserve” a spot if they’re not actually in the nearest pool.

Other than the small infinity pools there are two other pools up top. One is that near the the front of the ship and near the Retreat. Traditionally on P&O and Princess, this is the adults pool, the quiet one, the one for swimmers rather than noisy shits. Yeah, not a chance on Iona. That lack of space and the presence of a bar meant this area was also rammed when the sun was out and people wanted to enjoy it (the sun, not the unheated pool) but nobody could move at the aft area as all the limited floor space was filled. And this was on a reduced-capacity cruise. How the hell is this going to work at full capacity?

The other pool was in the Sky Dome. Ah yes. The spot on Iona designed after this conversation:

Should we have an indoor pool on Iona?

Sounds sensible. Nice pool. Glass roof. Lovely.

We could make the area circular so that we block off a far more massive area of the top deck than necessary and create a rounded eyesore.

Yeah, who could argue that wasn’t a good idea?

Oh, and here’s a thought…

Go on.

We can put on music performances in there.

So we can periodically close off the pool? I like it.

Yeah, and everyone likes a music performance in an enclosed space with rapidly rising heat levels and bad acoustics where it’s already horribly humid.

Perfection, mate.

Miscellaneous Good And Bad Iona Points

Yeah, told you that “short and quick” was a relative term. I’ll speed things up a bit to finish this off.

GOOD.

• Quiz Passport. We loved this. If you win a trivia game (and possibly other types too; we never found out) then you receive stamps in a passport book that you can redeem for prizes at the end of the cruise. This means the days of multiple keychains or tote bags are gone if you’re smart enough. We’d never won a trivia game on a P&O ship before and somehow managed to win four – two of them on tiebreakers – which meant we got a glass tumbler with P&O Cruises on it. Fabulous.
• Automatic Doors. Who doesn’t like approaching a door and waving their hand mystically in front of it to make it open?
• Style. Iona is a new ship and she’s very stylish. The atrium was bright and airy. The general decor was lovely. Sindhu was absolutely stunning-looking.
• Entertainment. I’ve said we don’t do entertainment typically but we caught some accidentally and, with the exception of a comedian whose material should’ve been destroyed by the same impact event that wiped out the dinosaurs, it was good stuff. La Voix and the Limelights in the Limelight Club were superb, there were some decent singers, acrobatic bits in the atrium, some pleasant sea shanties, and for the second cruise in a row we were treated to close-up magic at our table, and even took a souvenir from the occasion. I saw Sue Holderness give a talk that was quite enjoyable too.

BAD.

• Food Quality. Generally, it was just not what we’re used to. It wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t feel as good as it’s been on other ships, P&O or otherwise. And the range of food was small, too. Breakfast, for instance offered very little, if any, variety. There is only so much mileage you can get out of that “Well, Covid, you know” excuse. The steaks in the Keel & Cow and at the Epicurean were… meh. They were cooked how I wanted but the meat was tougher than I’d expected and lacking a little flavour.
• Internet. Pointless to get, but we’d heard that before boarding. One of the staff members told us that she could only talk to her family at home when they got to port. It’s difficult to guess why this was the case on such a new ship.
• Service. Unpredictable would be the word here. Sometimes it was perfect, mostly it was okay, but you tend to remember when it’s bad and that’s the case here. I’ve already mentioned how slow it was in the Epicurean but we had poor service in Brodie‘s (another couple had to wander up to the bar to get someone to come around to our part of the bar), slow service in the main dining room for lunch, and some abysmal service on the last night in the Club House. I’d estimate there were two dozen people in there, including us, and about one member of staff per table if we’d wanted it so you wouldn’t think there would be a problem getting someone to take your drinks order, but if the DJ reads this then I’m the guy who walked up to his booth past midnight, held up my phone with its running timer on it, and put in a request for “A drink” by “Anyone” that sent him scurrying to the bar. 24 minutes we waited, in a near-empty, well-staffed lounge, and I didn’t even start that timer until we’d been sat there for four or five before that.
• My Holiday “App”. It’s not an app; it’s a website. Anyway, it’s not awful, but it’s lacking some refinement and improvements. List all the dining venues with status and queue would be good. Make the food and drinks menus and daily programme available as PDFs. Those are two simple changes that would help a lot.

Iona Cruise Conclusion

As I’ve said, there will be more detailed write-ups to come, and hundreds of photos and videos, but our thoughts about this ship soon after getting off are that we won’t be looking to book anything else on her. Of course I’m listing bad points more than good because I wanted to like Iona and I wanted to have a great time, but I just didn’t. I know other people did, but they may have had lower expectations and a crappier cruise history (because ours has been awesome) to compare against. These issues – drinks package aside – are all minor when taken separately, but they added up to disappointment. Some of these things may never happen again (shit happens, you know); some may simply be things other people expect or accept and subsequently don’t care about.

This was the first cruise we’ve ever had where that last evening came around and those letters appeared letting us know when we could disembark and we weren’t sitting there thinking “No, I don’t want to get off.” We were totally indifferent to it, and probably mostly because we know we’ve got Sky Princess coming up in a few weeks where we’re anticipating a far better time will be had.

We didn’t have a terrible cruise. Somebody had to be evacuated by helicopter off the French coast, and two ambulances pulled up alongside the ship after we’d docked. Those people had terrible cruises. We were two adults, lucky to live in a place where we could get out to sea for a week, who enjoyed spotting whales and dolphins and bats, ate, drank, read, were entertained, and took part in and won quizzes. We had a good time. We just didn’t have as good a time as we’d hoped.

There are cruise bloggers who are obsessed with the ships or certain lines – lots of them; in fact, most of the ones we know, I think – but we’re primarily itinerary and price-driven (Virgin Voyages are a big exception to the rule here; that’s all about the experience). We would never rule out a ship based on our own experiences or from any reviews we’ve read but Iona is a long way down any list of future possibilities. As for P&O: we have another cruise due with them in a couple of months (Ventura to the Canaries) and we won’t be getting the drinks package so are hopeful for a return to the standard we’ve come to expect.

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