All the details on what to expect when flying to a P&O Caribbean cruise: How do you book seats? can you be sat together? What are the planes like? What happens with your luggage? How do transfers between ship and airport work? Answers to these questions and more…
The subject of flights seems, along with that of availability of sunbeds, to be one of the most-discussed topics on the P&O Arvia cruise Facebook groups.
The P&O Arvia Caribbean cruise flights are specially chartered for P&O’s cruise passengers, so some of the usual processes you might be familiar with for holiday flights are slightly different, which can lead to confusion and uncertainty about how it all works and what to expect.
Obviously everyone’s experience of flying to a Caribbean cruise holiday will differ – with different airports, airlines, schedules, etc – but hopefully this explanation of the process we had will shed some light on what the flights to a P&O Arvia Caribbean cruise are like…
Seat Booking
When we booked our cruise, flight details were not available and we had to wait until closer to the time to find out key information about our flights, including what airport (we’d already specified London, but not whether it was Heathrow or Gatwick), what terminal, flight time and plane type.
This information eventually appeared in our P&O Cruises online account several months prior to the date of our cruise, revealing that we were flying with the airline Tui from Gatwick at 10.10am.
A few weeks later, the other half of the passengers on our same cruise were allocated their flights on the now infamous ‘Maleth Aero’ airline, to absolute uproar thanks to the news that, for them, there was no premium seating, the seats were unusually narrow and the old planes had no in-flight entertainment – as well as various other issues that concerned the passengers allocated to Maleth.
Once the Maleth flights started taking off, we saw a lot of comments that it wasn’t as bad as many people feared – but also a lot of complaints, including a few people we spoke to on our cruise who flew on Maleth Aero flights and said it was a poor experience.
At the time of writing, there are rumours that P&O will not continue to use Maleth Aero for flights after March 2024.
We counted ourselves lucky to have been allocated a Tui flight, although we still had concerns about whether we’d be able to choose our own specific seats, whether we’d all be sat together and whether there was any extra legroom seating available for at least me, who is 6’3″ and struggles to fit in standard seats, especially for long-haul flights.
The option to select the seats for your flights becomes available in your P&O Cruises online account exactly 14-weeks before the date of your cruise, at precisely midnight on that day.
There’s a link in that account to a separate flight seats booking system, which doesn’t work until that deadline passes. Only after midnight of the day precisely 14-weeks before your cruise can you then login to the separate flight booking site.
I stayed up late that night, hoping to get my seat selections in the second they became available to book.
Sure enough, at precisely midnight we got an email announcing that flight seat booking was now open and I was able to login to the seat booking system.
There is no obligation to pre-book your specific seats via this system. If you do so, you’re charged a fee (I believe it was £80 per person). If you decide you don’t want to pay this, you can just do nothing at this point and you’ll be randomly allocated a seat when you check-in at the airport.
Unfortunately, compared with the main P&O site, which is a very user-friendly website, the flight seat booker is a nightmare system that looks like an old website from the early 2000’s and which seems to immediately crash when seat bookings are released.
I was up until 2am trying to book an extra legroom seat for myself, repeatedly refreshing the system and getting all manner of error messages until eventually I could pick one extra legroom seat for both legs of the journey, which cost several hundred pounds.
All the Premium Economy seats, which I really wanted, had already been fully booked.
Because of the high cost to choose your specific seat – and then the extra charge for a legroom seat – we decided just to do it for mine, as everyone else in the family has much shorter legs, and we hoped P&O / Tui would allocate us seats together at the time of check-in (which they did).
Airport check-in process
The next step in the process came in the days leading up to departure for our cruise, which was to print our luggage labels.
In your P&O Cruises online account, you’ll have a link to luggage labels and boarding passes.
You download the luggage labels and print them out on your own home printer on ordinary sheets of A4 paper.
There is one luggage label per piece of checked-in hold baggage that you have – and you have to fold these pieces of paper up into a strip, following some simple folding instructions, and then staple them together around your suitcase handle.
People wonder if a simple piece of A4 paper folded up will be strong enough to stay on the case during a flight and we saw some people with laminated label holders on their cases, but the folded A4 paper luggage labels are strong enough and none of ours came off (on this or a previous cruise we did).
The boarding passes in your P&O online account are for the ship and not for the plane. There are no plane boarding passes as such at this point, which is something that causes a lot of confusion.
You simply turn up at the airport for check-in approximately 3-hours prior to your flight time and head for the clearly signposted P&O airport check-in desk.
They will take your checked-in luggage, weigh it and send it off down the conveyor belt system.
This is the last you’ll see of that luggage until it re-appears outside your cabin door on the ship, so make sure you pack in your hand luggage any essentials that you might need in the case of a flight delay or which you might need for when you first board the ship.
It was around 10pm Barbados time when our suitcases arrived at our cabin door on-board Arvia.
On checking in at Gatwick, we asked at the check-in desk if the three of our family who hadn’t pre-booked their seats could be sat together on the plane.
It turned out we didn’t need to ask, as the seats we’d been allocated were actually all together, with the three non-booked seats being placed in the row directly behind our one pre-booked seat.
So it seemed P&O / Tui had actively tried to group us all together, unlike for instance when you fly on Ryanair and it seems their ‘random allocation’ is intentionally designed to split you up.
At this point we were given plane boarding passes with barcodes that allowed us to proceed through security and then onto the plane at the boarding time.
Luggage allowance
Our standard luggage allowance was 23kg hold luggage per person plus an overhead locker-sized piece of hand luggage, plus one small ‘under-seat’ bag. Plenty of allowance for all our stuff for a family of four including suits, dresses for the formal nights and everything else.
Flight experience with Tui
Our flight on the way out was fine and went without a hitch.
The total flight time was 9-hours but the pilot said this was slightly longer than usual because of some strong headwinds which would slow the plane down.
Those winds were in our favour on the way home and the flight time was considerably quicker – about 7.5 hours on the way back.
The extra legroom seat had decent space for someone 6ft 3in and the rest of the family, sat together directly in the row immediately behind, were happy enough and I could easily share my legroom seat with them occasionally to give them a chance to stretch their legs a bit.
The in-flight food was good – actually nice, enjoyable meals – and there was a decent selection of in-flight films and TV shows.
The whole flight experience for our cruise was pretty good, although I know many others on other flights for our cruise and other cruises a week or so later had issues with delays, cancellations and so on – largely related to the weather.
The only thing that spoiled the experience slightly was a mix-up relating to the extra legroom seat on the return journey, where the configuration of the plane was different and the seat I’d paid extra for didn’t exist on that plane.
The Tui flight attendants on that flight were extremely unhelpful and chose to sit me – and the other paying extra legroom passengers – in standard seats at the back of the plane, rather than allow us to sit in other extra legroom seats, of which there were at least 18 that were totally empty.
There was a big row between passengers and the flight attendants at that point and eventually common sense won over and I did get my proper seat, so I was happy enough in the end!
Transfers to the airport at Barbados
On landing at Barbados airport, we got off the plane, down the steps and straight into a row of buses that were waiting for us on the runway, which took us directly to the ship.
There was no passport or luggage process at all at this stage – it was literally straight off the plane, onto a bus and off to Arvia at the port.
The bus journey from Barbados airport to Arvia took about 40-minutes, after which we got off the bus, straight through the immigration process at the port within a few minutes and then onto the ship.
Transfers from the ship back to the airport at the end of the cruise
The process of disembarking Arvia at the end of the cruise, getting to the airport and sorting out all the luggage, etc was smooth and straightforward, although again slightly different to what you may be used to on a normal non-cruise holiday.
An envelope was delivered to our cabin a few days before the end of the cruise.
It contained a schedule showing times at which we should complete the immigration process, which happens on board the ship rather than at the airport.
It was very simple. We just headed to the ‘Clubhouse’ on the ship at our allotted time, showed our passports and they gave us some small tags to prove that we’d completed the Barbados immigration process. All done within about 10-minutes or so.
The other schedule showed the time at which we needed to meet for final disembarkation.
There were also luggage tags (plastic ones supplied to us this time to be attached to our cases, replacing the print-at-home paper ones we’d used for the journey out here).
Our checked-in hold luggage had to be packed the night before leaving the ship – and left outside our cabin door any time in the evening up to midnight.
The cabin stewards would then whisk those cases away and, much like on the journey here, we wouldn’t see those cases again until we arrived at the baggage carousel back at Gatwick airport, so again you need to be sure you’ve got what you need for the day / night on the plane in your hand luggage, which you keep with you.
On the day of disembarkation, we had to be out of our cabin at 9am, but were free to remain on board the ship – or indeed to go off into Barbados and come back to the ship later if we wanted.
You can leave your hand luggage at the Headliners Theatre on the ship if you want to, but there was a big queue to do this, so we just kept ours with us on the ship and just sat around in the atrium reading, typing up blog posts for this site, having a quick final lunch in the Keel & Cow, and getting some last-minute tanning done on the decks prior to our departure time.
At our scheduled time (1pm) we had to head to the Headliners Theatre, where all passengers leaving that day sit down together and wait to be sent out to the buses.
We didn’t have long to wait – about 20-minutes or so – before we were told our bus was ready and we were sent down to deck 3 to scan our cruise cards out for the last time and to head out on to the dock-side where a line of buses waited to take us back to Barbados airport.
The process was straightforward and, it seems like everything P&O did on this cruise, very well organised and run like clockwork.
Just over half-an-hour later, we were in the car park of the airport ready to go through security and wait for our night-time flight back home.
What it’s like at Barbados Airport
One final piece of advice about the Grantley Adams Airport at Barbados…
We wondered the night before whether we should dress for the cold December weather that awaited us back home, or the hot Caribbean weather that we’d still be waiting in at the airport for our flight.
The answer, without any shadow of a doubt, is to dress for the hot weather as Barbados airport is a dreadful place, crammed full of thousands of travellers with zero air conditioning – and it’s built almost like a greenhouse in the way it traps the heat.
It’s boiling hot in there and a very uncomfortable place to be even if you only have to wait a few hours for a flight that’s on time (which ours was). The thought of being stuck in there for hours more if your flight is delayed is terrible! So be prepared for a hot and uncomfortable few hours at the airport (hopefully it’s no longer than that).
Facilities there are also quite limited – and it’s expensive ($11 for two small bottles of water for example).
It also seems to have to cater for way more passengers than it was originally built to accommodate, with lots of people sat on floors due to the lack of chairs and long queues snaking around the building for departure gates which aren’t always 100% clearly marked.
Don’t worry about it too much – we got through fine and despite the cramped conditions it was all pretty straightforward.
Just prepare yourself for a very hot and pretty unenjoyable airport experience, which soon disappears from memory, unlike the many brilliant life-long memories of your experiences from the holiday.