Parking & Embarkation:

P&O parking is managed by a third party who insist on them parking your car for you where they take ownership of your keys and car for the duration of the cruise. Generally this has been a very slow process as you are forced to wait in organised queues while you are finally directed to offload your luggage just outside the terminal. I am not a fan of this procedure as this does tend to add waiting time of approximately up to 1 hour before embarkation plus in the past on returning to my car there was damage to the rear panel. Heads up - parking with P&O means that you sign and agree that any damage cannot be claimed on behalf of the parking company! That's in the T&C!. Contrast this with Royal and Celebrity where you self park your car where you just walk to the ship in a fraction of the time. Embarkation was slow and while there was organisation to boarding we were at the back of the queue for quite some time. Previous cruises with Royal and Celebrity we were directed to the front of the queue. On this occasion we were placed in a waiting area. We arrived on time according to the boarding time of 2pm where we waited over 45 minutes. We eventually got on board but there was quite a rush before we had to attend the muster station drill.

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