I have cruised many times over the years, and P&O are the worst I have ever experienced. They missed ports due to “bad weather” when it was 20 degrees and sunny with no wind, the food was appalling as was the entertainment - three of whom told us that it was their first time ever performing on a cruise ship.

Food - usually there are several included restaurants, a buffet that serves a large variety of different foods and a couple of “speciality” restaurants serving exclusive food for which you pay for. P&O have more restaurants that you pay for than they do included ones which are not serving exclusive food, just normal food like steaks and curries. The buffet serves exactly the same food as the included restaurants with the added bonus of the food being cold, and serving leftovers from the previous day. I had a lasagna and my daughter had pasta bolognaise and the meat used was actually chile con carne (yes in the lasagna as well). The desserts are always the same, and are frozen as opposed to being freshly made on board and again always have whatever the included restaurants are serving, so if you didn’t fancy anything on the menu in the included restaurants then hard luck. We did try the Keel and Cow which is the paid steak restaurant, we ordered fillet steak and paid extra for my daughter to have a “surf and turf” which included a lobster tail. One of the steaks arrived undercooked (ordered medium well and it arrived medium rare) so we asked if it could be cooked a little longer. Bear in mind a decent restaurant will give you another steak cooked as it should be and not recook the same one but we were prepared to accept the steak grilled again for a bit longer, but instead they MICROWAVED the steak and sent it back with the consistency of a Wellington boot sole. The lobster tail was so overcooked you could not scrape the flesh out of the shell with a knife, so we sent this back as well, and were given another one, microwaved to such an extent it was curved rather than flat on the plate, and again so rubbery it was inedible. This is one of their “exclusive speciality” restaurants and the most amazing thing that onboard was one of their “food heroes” who was Marco Pierre White, who I am pretty sure is very capable of cooking a steak and lobster correctly, so why not have him teach their chefs? In the included restaurants the breakfast is warmer than the buffet, but the toast is always cold, and the service is terrible - you have to ask for more tea or coffee instead of being offered, and if the person you ask is not your waiter, then you don’t get it at all. Lunchtime they served Southern Fried chicken in a roll, and mine was raw in the middle. Overall, food was below average of an average restaurant, a fact echoed by Marco Pierre White during one of his meet and greet sessions when he said it was nowhere near the quality that it should be or used to be.

Entertainment - usually you get one theatre act per night plus extra singers or comedians or something playing in other venues. Not P&O. Bearing in mind this was only a seven night cruise they had one theatre act that was excellent called Centre Stage, and they performed on two days, they had a acrobatic act that performed three different acts every day (except when an injury stopped the first act being done again) and they were very good as well. On top of that they had a rubbish comedian on for two days and I have seen funnier children’s party comedians, a supposed Michael Buble tribute singer who sounded like bad karaoke, some average and unfunny magicians who thought they were funny, and jazz quartet who were very good (if you could get into the 7/10 club to see them) and Pulse who were their resident singers who did rock music quite well, but all other genres they were very bad at. The entertainment on sea days were pretty much all things that cost money (jewellery talks, watch talks, auctions etc) or very low quality activities. I tried the “archery” which, after queuing for hours, turned out to be a toy bow with arrows that had suckers on them where you had 8 arrows at fire at a target and then had to leave. Read more