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Simplon - The Passenger Ship Website -
www.simplonpc.co.uk
Simplon Home - www.simplonpc.co.uk - Simplon facebook - Recent Updates - Search Simplon - Copyright Information - Contact Simplon - www.pocruises.com This website has no connection with any shipping company, cruise line, boat operator or other commercial organisation - There are no postcards or images for sale on this website |
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Britannia Cruise P&O Cruises - 7 Night Cruise to Guernsey, Spain & France - May 2015 IMO number: 9614036 - Name of ship: BRITANNIA - Call Sign: 2HHG5 MMSI: 235106595 - Gross tonnage: 143730 - DWT: 11793 - Year of build: 2015 Each image links to a larger copy which opens in a new window/tab This page is under construction! |
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This page starts with some
images of Britannia's maiden arrival at Southampton on 6th March, followed
by a selection of images from a seven night cruise from Southampton to
Guernsey, A Coruña, Bilbao and la Rochelle on P&O's 2015 ship Britannia,
which is now their flagship.
Aurora was the last ship designed specifically for P&O Cruises. Arcadia was intended for Holland America and Cunard before being assigned to P&O. Ventura and Azura were both based on Princess designs and Britannia is based on the Princess Cruises' Royal Princess design. As such the design is a bit of a mess. She has no traditional promenade deck and the jogging track is a short circuit around the funnels requiring seven circuits to complete a mile. P&O have the nerve to describe this as the Promenade. There is no view forwards from any of the open decks, but at least she has a Crow's Nest bar unlike semi-sister Royal Princess. The ship is very long with seemingly endless corridors of cabins. There are three sets of lifts but whilst the forward and aft lifts also have adjacent stairs, the midships stairs only go up to deck 7 (out of 18). Our cabin was located midships on Deck 9 so we were forced to wait for the hideously overcrowded lifts or to walk 100m or so to the nearest stairs. Insanity. The style of the ship is bland hotel modernism with the same dreary pastel blues, greens and browns throughout the ship. Whilst it is nothing like as horrible all the all-brown Royal Princess, one searches in vain for a bit of adventurous style that matches spaces in the similarly sized Solstice class ships. It seems that the adoption of the blue funnel and tatty flag livery has coincided with a total reboot in P&O history. There is not a single photo of a ship anywhere in board and certainly no ship models. P&O seem to be ashamed of the 175 plus years the company has been in existence. The deck names Canberra, Devanha, etc have also been dropped so we just have F Deck 9. Only the Peninsular, Oriental and Meridian restaurant names have survived. Food in the main restaurants was better than I remember, but the extra-cost restaurants are largely just more pretentious rather than offering better or more interesting food. Eating in the Epicurean (£28 charge) is an extremely lengthy process, with time for a short snooze between courses. |
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