This was the first time my wife and I have had the chance to enjoy Christmas together on a cruise due to work commitments. We have been on Iona previously (three times) and enjoyed it, the ship is beautiful. However this time the ship was full and it seemed to me there were not enough staff. The first formal evening was chaos. There were no places to eat. Everyone was being told to join either the virtual queue on the 'Myholiday' on board website or pick up pagers. We picked up a pager at 6:50pm and it had still not alerted at 8:10pm we went back there was a huge queue and after another 20 minutes still had no alert. So we went to eat in the buffet. The next day the hotel manager (Katey) made a tannoy announcement basically blaming the guests for the problems. She said guests should join the virtual queue on the 'MyHoliday' and stay in their cabins until called.

Now the My Holiday app (not an app it's just an on board website on the intranet) is glitchy, freezes and is unreliable it barely worked in our cabin. However come Christmas day, another formal evening we were told we must join the virtual queue after 7:30pm which actually didn't become available until 8pm. We joined the queue at 8pm but didn't get called until 9:05 when we actually got seated, the service was painfully slow. The didn't even lay the table properly, other tables had Christmas crackers we did not. When we asked for them the waiter just threw a pile on the table. We didn't finish the meal until 11:15pm and we didn't even have coffee.

So because of this we didn't get to enjoy any of the on board entertainment that night. Read more