Retracing the steps of the Apprentice in Bruges on Ventura!

A lot of you might have seen the Apprentice recently where they went on P&O Britannia over to Bruges and organised a shore excursion for customers. I recently did a similar cruise on Ventura so here are some of my thoughts and also what I made of their attempt at shore excursions.

I went on a 2 night cruise on P&O Ventura and was very excited about going to Bruges and seeing the old city and tasting some beer and chocolate.

The embarkation in Southampton was incredibly straightforward as I only live 10 minutes away from the terminal, once on-board we headed straight to our inside cabin and chucked our bags in then up to the Breakers bar for some sail away drinks as the sun went down!

There aren’t drinks package options on P&O but its a bit unnecessary anyway, in my opinion, as the drinks prices are quite reasonable at about £4 a pint with no % of extra service charge on top of that. Read some of my articles on drinks packages as well and you’ll see what I think generally! Click here for drinks blog

I liked the ship, there were bits if I’m honest that were a bit less polished than a lot of ships I’ve been on and the ship is definitely showing its age, saying that the staff were very friendly and efficient and everything ran like clockwork from boarding to dining to the disembark in Southampton. The cabin was a decent size for two people sharing and I didn’t feel cramped, although being in an inside cabin for the first time I did find it strange not having daylight outside to identify the sort of time it was! If you were critical and looked closely you could see that parts of the cabin were sort of looked over a bit in the corners and it could have been a little cleaner but that would be being picky, the cabin on the whole was very clean and tidy and well appointed.

Being a mini cruise you could tell that a lot of people were just on for a bit of a booze cruise and the now banned stag do/hen do crowd were out in force. I found this quite good fun personally but I think I have to agree with the P&O policy on this in some ways as you might put off first time cruisers if they didn’t like this sort of atmosphere and the regular cruisers who do P&O all the time. Please feel free to put any thoughts in the comments!!

The entertainment on board was a Take That tribute (for the hen do’s I would say) and a sixties tribute band, both of which I strangely enjoyed. The Take That guys were very good and it was entertainment in itself to see grown women getting all excited about grown men pretending to be a boyband from almost 30 years ago.

So on to the Apprentice, it was an interesting watch as the candidates had to plan a shore excursion that cruisers on the Britannia would have liked in Bruges.

Firstly I would say you wouldn’t have known how long they had to plan for the shore excursions because the programme is heavily edited I reckon but I don’t think that really excuses the general cluelessness shown by one of the teams. If you did even the most basic research on Bruges as a place or indeed Belgium/Europe you would come to the conclusion that the last reason people go to these sort of places is for the modernity. So of course team graphine chose to do  a tour of modern Bruges and utilizing Segways in the mix as well and they somehow won, so maybe that shows what I know! Generally both teams made a big mess of it all, getting lost, arguing amongst themselves and just the general strangeness of some of the characters like Elizabeth. The price of £100 per person bandied around on the Apprentice was also way too high in my opinion, for the sort of things they included I reckon you shouldn’t be charging more than £60-70 per person and that’s if its being conducted in a professional organised way and I was surprised that people were willing to pay that. Again thoughts in the comments!!

Anyway I wouldn’t go to Bruges for the modern city. I liked the beer, the chocolate and the general festival feel of the place. We were lucky enough to see an oompa band playing some brass favorites while we wandered around the shops.

If I was to design a tour for Bruges I would go along the lines of what the teams did, just without the segways and general chaos and probably around the £60pp mark. Personally Id go for the foodie side of things as there is some great Belgian food out there. I found a wonderful waffle place that was quite reasonable and had a whole host of options as toppings. I went for plain old  strawberries, without cream etc but was rewarded by the fact that they had a whole table full of every type of sprinkle topping you could imagine to add on top of your waffle, yum.

A chocolate factory should be a must do as should some beer tasting, there’s no need to go to a brewery as there were plenty of lovely bar/restaurants in the squares, where you can get a full choice. I think then the history would have been the way to go rather than the modern. Having been to Winchester and the Christmas markets there recently though, I would have to say outside of the food and drink on offer I didn’t find things that were that appealing in Bruges that you couldn’t get in the UK in terms of things to see. Some of the most unique things were probably the canals which were a bit different and really pretty.

So all in all a good cruise experience and a bit of a knees up as well, being the most frequent cruise line to go out of Southampton I would most certainly get on a P&O one again!