One World Again for 2020

Today sees the release of brand new itineraries from P&O Cruises for winter 2019 into spring of 2020, including their 2020 World Cruise Programme. As with 2019 this is the second year in a  row that P&O only have one ship, Arcadia, doing the round world voyage.

Arcadia is a really good choice for this long trip as she is adults only, I doubt many people would want to take children on such a long cruise, and also has a good range of cabins and on board facilities. She is also quite small by today`s standards, just 83,781 tonnes and carries just over 2000 passengers.

All of this points to a real decline in UK cruisers wanting to do the Round World Trip, from a couple of years ago when the line had 3 vessels undertaking world cruise in January.

The itinerary is different for 2020 as well, with New Zealand being one of the focal points having  three ports of call – Auckland, Tauranga and Bay of Islands.

One thing that I have noticed, looking at the itinerary just released today, is that there seems to be a larger than usual amount of sea days. A quick call to Madeira, en route to Barbados, has nine sea days at the start. The on through the Panama Canal via Curacao and more sea days. San Francisco is the US port of call with a two day stopover, before sailing to Honolulu with four sea days either side. The three ports in New Zealand precede three Australian calls, Sydney ,  Brisbane and the Whitsunday Islands then its off to Manila in the Phillipines, takes 6 sea days to get there!

Shanghai is the stop in China, presumably because the visa situation for Shanghai is easier than Beijing, then the more traditional route home calling at Hong Kong, Singapore, Port Kelang, Muscat and Dubai. Finally transit the Suez Canal and back to Southampton with stops in Malta and Lisbon.

Nice itinerary yes, a bit different than usual and maybe I`m just being picky but it really looks on the face of it that there are far less ports visited in 2020, in fact in 2019 there are 33 but just 26 in 2020.  Is the world shrinking ? No but World Cruise looks like it is!