Norway 2025 – Day One & Two – Comfort in Repetition

There’s a lot to be said for the comfort of familiar things – a favourite place, a much loved song or a film that lifts you – and it can be very discombobulating to do someting that on the outside appears to be the same but is actually very different. I guess that this is how I feel at the moment…

Discombobulated

We like cruises as they are a great way to see several new places in one week, and we treat them just like a floating hotel that opens up on a new adventure every morning. These day trips then serve as a taster and help us decide if we want to come back for a longer visit in the future.

To date, every one of these cruises has been with Tui, but Helen in particular wanted to go and see the fjords and, more generally, Norway, and Tui don’t sail there. After a bit of a search, we found what seemed like a good option with P&O.

As a side note, it turns out that P&O Cruises are owned by Carnival and are nothing to do with the ferry operator of the same name that got into so much trouble for sacking all their local employees to replace them with cheaper immigrant workers. Of course, the majority of workers on all cruise ships are sourced from the parts of the world where wages are cheaper, and the poor buggers can spend six months waiting on us without ever setting foot on land as they don’t have the necessary visas, etc. Anyway, I digress.

One big advanage of a P&O cruise is that it sails from Southampton so no flights and hanging around in airports is required.

One big disadvantage of a P&O cruise is that it sails from Southampton so you spend an hour crawling 14 miles through the city waiting at poorly set traffic lights!

At the port it was incredibly well organised both as our car was whisked away from us and we were checked into the boat.

Artificial scarcity

So, back to that familiarity. Tui ships are about half the size of those employed by P&O and so you are immediately left wondering where everything is and with so many people getting the lift is a time comsuming experience but it is a beautiful and well maintained place and the journey (so far) has been as smooth as silk.

Obviously, we are very familiar with how Tui operates, and I am very familiar with application UI design and development. Like on Tui ships you are encouraged to “download” their “apps” which provide information about what is going on and allow you to make bookings. I have “download” and “app” in parenthasis as they are neither an app and, therefore, are also not downloadable.

Anyway, you navigate to a web page and see that all the restaurants are “fully booked” 😱 – ok, bread and water for us tonight. Turns out that they are not fully booked at all just simply that joining the virtual queue doesn’t open until a set time. If it said that on the “app” it would have saved time and a trip to reception to find out what was going on.

When you join the virtual queue, you have to wait for a notification to tell you that your table is ready, but because this isn’t an app and is only an “app”, you can’t get notifications, only a pop-up on the webpage, which you need to keep open to wait for! And when you do get in, you find that half the tables at least are empty, which strikes me as a bit of artificial scarcity at work.

At least on Tui you can just rock up and join a real queue and wait for a table to become available, you know, just like a real restaurant!

Helen tells me that it is all fine and the issue is me being old and curmudgeonly but that seems pretty unlikely!

The Scent of Musk

In an effort to make this a “good news sandwich,” Wi-Fi onboard ships is usually both woeful and expensive. Now, thanks to Elon Musk’s Starlink, it is just expensive, but as me being able to post this proves, it is very much usable.