Hello from Carol

Hello everyone!


I'm delighted to be able to be guest blogger again for a few days as my colleagues are on leave.

It seems a while back now that I left Adonia in Civitavecchia on her Maiden Cruise, and of course she's now up in the fjords - getting into some of the beautiful little nooks and crannies that the other ships can't reach, due to her size. I spoke to the Commodore after her last cruise, also a fjords trip, and he was certainly enjoying taking her into some interesting places - that's small ship driving for you! The play we launched on Adonia - Private Lives by Noel Coward performed by our Headliners Theatre Company - continues to go well. I just can't imagine how the actors and actresses remember up to 68 pages of script...but they do...so good for them! It was especially interesting for me to see it again as I went to Noel Coward's house in Jamaica on one of our excursions from Ventura when I was on holiday on her back in February - such a great location for a house with wonderful views over the coastline. No wonder he wrote such delightful plays!

I hosted a table at our long service awards dinner last evening in Southampton which was very enjoyable. I'm sure some of you will know Hughie Taylor, one of our most experienced cruise directors, and also his wife Davina - well Hughie was receiving his 30 year award, and was in great spirits. David Dingle, our CEO was presiding, and when he was presenting the award to Hughie it was difficult to work out which of them was making the speech.... it was more like a double act! Captain Ian Walters was also receiving an award - for 40 years of service! What a great achievement. He has been Captain on many of our ships - most recently Arcadia, but is currently taking some time going round the fleet working with our other captains - sharing his experience. We also had some of our shore colleagues who were awarded 20 year service awards in areas such as Customer Services, Finance, Purchasing and IT. Its great to have a mix of new and long serving staff.

We announced last week the launch of our 2013 World Cruise programme, so our World Cruise brochure will be out soon and the full world cruises and line voyages to and from Australia and New Zealand will be on sale from 14th July. We have our largest ever programme, with 4 ships - Adonia, Arcadia, Aurora and Azura, yes Azura - setting off on long winter cruises in 2013. It will be the first long winter cruise for Azura, and so she'll have many maiden calls on her 110 night adventure. She is going to be staying for 2 days in several ports such as Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai and Cape Town, which we have added due to feedback from our existing world cruisers who would like more time in some of the main ports. Of course you can fly out to join her for around 2 or 3 weeks of her cruise and then fly back, so its a great way to see another part of the world from the familiar surroundings of one of our ships, and of course she's one with lots of choice of facilities and entertainment on board.

We've now got such a range of winter holidays we've decided to produce a separate 2013 Winter Holidays brochure, which has all these exotic shorter fly cruises in it alongside cruising from Southampton during the winter on Oceana and Oriana and of course Ventura's Caribbean fly cruise programme. This brochure will be out shortly and the cruises go on sale on 15 July.

So I'll be back in a few days to let you know what else we've been up to lately.

Kind regards

Carol