P&O Azura, P&O Cruises

Just returned from 16 night Med cruise on the Azura. We had a wonderful time on this ship. The food was brilliant, probably the best food on any cruise we have already done. We find P&O's food and service in the restaurants far better than with any other cruise company as you get a more varied menu and also silver service on these ships. We opted for freedom dining for the first time ever and it really worked for us. You can choose if you want a table for 2 or sit with others and decide what time you want to eat. If they have not got anything available, they give you a pager and it bleeps when they are ready to seat you. The longest we had to wait was 15 minutes, but this was only on a couple of occassions on formal evenings. We also tried the two select dining restaurants - Sindhu and Seventeen. Although you have to pay a cover charge of £15 or £20 for these, we found it well worth it (even though I'm a Yorkshireman) as the food was absolutely delicious in both places. The bar prices were very reasonable as were the prices for bottles of wine a pint of beer was £2.70 lager was £2.95 and the cocktails were reasonable too (not that I drank cocktails!). The cabins were quite spacious with plenty of drawer and open wardrobe space. We opted for an inside cabin this time so we could spend more on excursions etc, but they were more spacious then we have previously had on other ships. The cabin steward did, as usual, a wonderful job of keeping our cabin in tip top condition. The entertainment on board was the best we have ever seen. There were two other entertainment lounges, apart from the theatre, (Malibar and Manhattan) where they had singers, comedians and magicians etc, who in our opinion were all pretty good. Sir Henry Cooper was aboard and did two different spots talking about his great boxing career, and also Roy Walker was aboard who was very funny as he always was. On the downside, there were a a few small teething problems with the ship eg, the cabin card door locks sometimes stopped working as did the cabin TV and sometimes the public toilets on decks were out of order, but this did not spoil any fun whatsoever. A problem, we found, which happens on all ships and hotels etc, was the reserving of sunbeds, especially when it tells you in the ships daily newspaper not to do this, but some people actually went to reserve their sunbeds in ideal positions on the ship before breakfast by placing a towel and books on them and then went away without even sitting on them to have breakfast and not return for a couple of hours. We did not like this behaviour and it caused alot of resent amongst passengers. My idea would be that if you use the sun bed for a couple of hours in the morning, you were allowed to go for lunch for a short while and then return to that same sunbed, but people just did what they pleased. Sadly I do not think there will ever be an adequate solution to this problem. Anyway this was a great ship & we had a great cruise. 

We have just returned from a trip on P&Os’ new ship ‘Azura’ and we’ve had a wonderful time. The service was excellent, food brilliant and entertainment wonderful from spectacular shows by the Headliners group, comedians, cabaret artists and talks. We only had an inside state room but were delighted with it as it was well fitted out with separate storage/wardrobe area and also clever console housing plasma screen/tea/coffee making facility and a fridge. There were wall length mirrors behind bed and in front so made room feel very spacious. We ate on first sitting club dining at 8.30 which suited us very well. For breakfast we went in table waited restaurants but lunch mainly self service. Having had a stroke last year and my walking restricted I found the ship easy to get about with all the automatic doors, lifts and rails everywhere.