jh1809

I would be surprised if your daughter staying overnight at least once during the period you are away wasn't sufficient, but if you should need to claim then the insurer might ask for some proof that you weren't just saying that and that she had actually done so. I'm not sure how you would do that, so I think it would be best to speak to them. You can't be the first in this situation, so you'd expect them to have something in place to cover it.

Don't forget to check your home insurance as well as your travel insurance. My own policy has a limit of 35 consecutive nights when the house can be left empty, for instance.

I'd much sooner have that than risk it being too hot. I don't like it hot weather and lazing on beaches really isn't my thing. So when I go to the Med it's always in April/May or late September/October/November.

The only one that really appealed to me was Arcadia's 19-day Central Med cruise in Oct-Nov 25, which includes Tangier, Heraklion and Kusadesi, none of which I've visited. But prices - at least for single cabins - are very expensive, so I think I'll wait in the hope that they come down. (I'd have thought they should have called it Eastern Med, as Crete and Turkey are hardly central.)

I was on Arcadia in August, and agree that the Ocean Grill was superb. Sindhu was also very good, though perhaps not quite as good as the one on Aurora. The pop-up Glasshouse wasn't on every sea day and was only at lunch-time, as it used the Ocean Grill's kitchen, and I don't think it was bookable.

I've just received an email from P&O with the subject line: "FIRSTNAME, a discounted price for your once-in-a-lifetime adventure". That hardly creates the best impression.

Could conceivably be diverted to Morocco, though. I've no idea what their rules are. (They aren't in the EU, of course.)

The obvious way to get a lot more space - at least on Aurora and Arcadia, where ships' photographers seem to be a thing of the past - would be to reuse the huge amount of space currently given over to a non-existent photo gallery.

In addition to what others have said, Aurora has a grander atrium. Also the Vivo coffee shop is better located compared to the rather dark and cramped one on Arcadia. And the lifts are more sensibly laid out. (Arcadia's three sets of two by the midship stairwell are particularly annoying. The call buttons only work for the set they are located by, and even if a lift in another set should happen to stop at that deck the sets are too far apart to get across in time.) Arcadia has a very impressive theatre, though. Also the location of the public loos is more predictable on Arcadia, whereas they seem to be placed rather at random on Aurora. Overall I think Aurora has the edge, but there isn't a huge amount in it.

Yes, that was the case on Arcadia last month.

I'm Caribbean tier and for my cruise on Arcadia last month was given a boarding time of 12:30. If it's any consolation, I wasn't over-impressed by the lunch. Perhaps my expectations were too high, as it was the first one I'd been to, having only just reached Caribbean.

On the evening I dined in Ocean Grill last month I didn't have any lengthy waits. That may be because I like to eat very early and so booked for the earliest possible time (I can't remember now, but it was either 6:00 or 6:30). Very good food, and not many items (and none that I chose) carried a supplement.

Like Winifred 22, I'm a solo but have still had two emails for each of my future cruises.

I suspect that P&O are working through everyone's future cruises in the order of when they were booked. You'd think that by now they'd have realised that they were sending out every email twice and have fixed it, though.

Turns out there's still no pre-booking for Arcadia.

I spoke too soon, as yesterday I had duplicate emails for one of my two 2024 cruises and also for my 2025 cruise.

It might be worth my while checking again for my Arcadia cruise departing on Tuesday then, just in case it's a fleet-wide change that P&O haven't bothered to announce.

I don't remember ever receiving such an email and I'm 74.

I doubt that it's an IT problem, as unless my memory is seriously at fault I was able to pre-book restaurants on the cruise personaliser in the year or two before Covid. Indeed, for my Northern Lights cruise on Aurora in March 2020 - which left Southampton on schedule but was aborted a few days later because Norway closed all its ports to cruise ships - I remember eventually getting a refund to my credit card for my pre-booking of Sindhu.

My own guess is that it might be that they currently can't guarantee in advance whether they'll have enough catering crew to actually operate the specialty restaurants. They seem to have struggled to tempt enough crew back post-Covid. (Incidentally it's not just the three ships that their email mentions where you can't pre-book. It also applies to Arcadia.)

Ah, looks like it was my mistake then. I'd thought that C101 was the mirror image of C102. Sorry about that.

Are you sure your cabin was C101, as you say "we" but I thought that was a single cabin. I was in C102, the corresponding cabin to C101 but on the opposite side of the ship, and that was certainly categorised as a single, even though it had either adjacent twin beds or a double (I can't remember which.)

The only snag with those forward cabins on C deck is that if a musical act or the Headliners are on in the theatre you get quite a bit of noise coming up into the cabin. Only really a problem if you're "early to bed" people, I suppose.

For my cruise on Arcadia on 8th August, an email I had from from P&O the other day encouraging me to pre-book things like wi-fi and (I think) spa treatments did mention that the specialty restaurants couldn't be pre-booked.

The first river cruise I ever did, about 10 years ago, it turned out that my cabin in the lowest deck was below the water line. I discovered when trying to asleep overnight that water is a very good conductor of sound, so I wished that I had brought ear plugs to keep out the noise from the screws and from locks filling and emptying.