yorkshirephil

The last time we went with P&O to St Petersburg we took a tour to the Hermitage museum with time on your own. This gave us the chance to mooch around and have a drink in local bars, we also walked around the church of the blood and visited a small market close by.

The system has worked well on our previous cruises, saves wasting paper.

I believe diamond is the new black, if you use the search facility there is quite a bit of info around the site.

We have cruise the Baltics with P&O and Princess, we found most things were similar, both great cruises, we were on Crown princess 2 years ago to Baltic, price was the deciding factor, although drinks are more expensive on Princess, made worse by weak sterling. There were more non brits on Princess, the entertainment was more geared up for brits as you would expect from Southampton.

Wine and beer is very reasonably priced on CMV compared to many other lines. drinks packages are also available from CMV.

We were informed on our return from the Caribbean in March that we would be docking in Southampton the evening before our scheduled arrival to miss a storm, we were told that we would not be able to get off until the original scheduled time, within minutes there were people queuing at reception demanding they be allowed to disembark in the evening, the captain explained that the ship could not be customs cleared and the luggage would not be taken off until the following morning. Probably the same people that moan that they can't embark early at the start of the cruise.

Call me an old cynic but P&O have sent out surveys for years, some lengthy some less so, usually under the heading "We value your opinion" This is so that they can say they were reacting to customer opinions when unpopular decisions are made.

We have just returned from a cruise on Marco Polo, we took our Columbus club booklet to the future cruise desk where the lady stamped our book with up to date details. CMV are a bit hit and miss with some things, but so are other lines sometimes.

Devil is in the detail, even when you do read the small print it is not always easy to fully understand some of the weasly phrases.

You too Steve

That's good, we never change dollars and euros as we will always be going back now we are retired, we may even bump into you in Canada as we are setting off Sunday for 30 night Canada in the fall with CMV.

Your best option will likely be to take smaller amounts on your onboard credit account as and when you need it, you are then less likely to have to change back to sterling if the weather is not good and you don't end up doing your planned trips. It is usually when you change back to Sterling that you get stung on the exchange rate.

In 20 plus years of cruising with various lines I have never had staff in any department trying to extract an extra tip, our last cruise was Cunard. I usually try and avoid tipping threads as they nearly always deteriorate into bad feeling between different nationalities with different cultures.But my preferred option is that the tips/gratuities are built into the cruise price, which is what P&O, CMV and Tui currently do, I then hope that the staff are paid fairly, if anyone feels that they need to tip extra, including me then so be it.

https://cruiseradio.net/from-gratuities-to-sex-cruise-ship-crew-member-tells-all/?fbclid=IwAR2g1uho1uWw_a-TSLNDwPImbUi7zQFTS-OYT88VeS2EdpKSENKlxAjD7W0 Picked this up from another site.

Ideally tip in the countries own currency. However if you were to tell someone that you only had USD available I am sure they wouldn't decline a tip.