We saw this cruise advertised by Imagine cruising who had chartered Queen Mary after covid restrictions forced her scheduled restart to be delayed. We were keen to sail again and the thought of some winter sun was enticing.

Pre sailing the online form filling was tedious and the arrival of a new variant of covid and subsequent media noise created more of it and raised stress levels.

On the day though we arrived in Southampton with enough time to drive around and familiarise ourselves with the location of the drive-through testing in relation to the ship and pick up some last-minute necessities. We went to the Mayflower test site just less than half an hour before our scheduled time and it was simple to drive through and there was no wait at each of the various points. Once the test was done and wristbands affixed we drove off to wait until our approval text arrived which it did within 15 minutes so we drove to Ocean terminal and left our car with CPS (very easy, would use them again) We dropped our bags off and entered the terminal. Our wristbands allowed us to proceed directly upstairs. We approached people and answered the healthcheck qustionnaire that we'd previously completed online as requested, (I don't know why it needed to be done twice but everyone had to enter via that route) Our wristband and confirmation text allowed us to approach the next person and our platinum status meant we were sent straight to a check-in desk (I suspect we'd have only had to wait for 1 person ahead of us if we hadn't reached such an exalted level as it wasn't busy) After a lot of faffing about I had managed to print our boarding pass out (I screen shot the thing & printed that as it kept printing only half of the thing when I downloaded it) Then security screening and we were back on board. We headed to our cabin, 6250, and collected our voyage cards at the cabin door. There were some welcome letters inside and a half bottle of Pol Acker in the fridge. Less than 3/4 of an hour from start to finish. Read more