Just to warn anyone without children with them on a cruise DO NOT go on Ventura.We were mislead into thinking that this Strictly Come Dancing cruise would be for adults in the most part. Surely going out of school holidays and with ballroom dancing as the theme , most people would have thought the same. But unfortunately the Captain had other ideas. There were hundreds of children on board because apparently in Scotland and some other parts of the UK the children had started their holidays. Okay we should have done our homework, but did they really want to be there with the Strictly theme ! No they didn't they wanted to splash and jump and dive in the pools and scream and shout as loud as possible with the playleaders encouraging them to do so. So when we realised that despite having 2 very large pools for the kids the smaller one had also been taken over by them. When we complained in a very nice way to reception, we were told that the Captain had changed the policy of keeping one pool adults only and if we didn't like it we should have gone on one of their adult only ships!! Not a very nice response. It wasn't until a few days later that another passenger told us that we could use the Spa pool ( all be it tiny)even if we didn't use any other facilities. Why didn't reception tell us this?!

This was one of many complaints. The buffet food was boring and repetitive and not good quality. The main dining food was decent but not first class, you could see that corners were being cut everywhere. Small choice of rolls, only 2 days were we offered luxury food and all of it on those 2 days because they knew if lobster and fillet steak etc were on menu daily we'd all want them. So the other days were ordinary food. The service in the main restaurant was diabolical. The waiters served the food across us instead of from behind, we were not given choice of rolls, they were just plonked on our plates. We had to send 5 glasses back because they were dirty. We were not given the choice of cheese and biscuits at the end of the meal and the coffee was awful.

Room srvice had such a limited menu and much of it was extra charge. AND NO complimentary soft drinks or ice cream !!! Only free drinks were tea,coffee and water! We had this and so much more on Queen Victoria. There is no comparison between the 2 ships. Cunard and the Queen Vic are head and shoulders above Ventura and P&O in every single department. When you walk onto the Queen Vic you feel special and there is that Wow factor. Everything about it is better. How P&O thought they could pull off a Ballroom Cruise without a ballroom I don,t know!! There ballroom is no bigger than a postage stamp and no seating to speak of. After 2nd sitting dinner we couldn't find seats there or almost anywhere where anything was going on. No escorts for the dancing (probably cos there was no room!) Read more