Why can you not book that late deal ?

My favourite time of the year (not) has approached again , I take the calls with sometime dread in my heart, when I hear the words “family of five”
and the children are 11 / 7 / 6 YES YOU GUESSED IT IS LATE SEASON.

Oh my heart just breaks as I know I am about to have a challenge. People call and tell me they can see all of these great late deals coming up yet cannot manage to book anything.

LETS START WITH CAPACITY and here I will once again pick on P&O, let say Ventura

And a few facts

Built 2008 Years old 9 Passengers 3106- 3727
Cabins 1553 Space Ratio 31 Tons 116017
Speed 21.0 Length 956 Beam 159 Crew 1226
Total decks: 18 Decks with cabins: 9
Last Drydock: 2013

So here we have one of the biggies in the fleet, and in July this year she will be around the Mediterranean.

Today is the second of June an I get one of the calls , I need a twin and three share cabin for my family to book, Ventura now knows how many passenger they already have booked and how many cabins are left, as you can see full capacity is 3727

Lets say they have 100 cabins left and already have 3527 passengers booked = 200 people they have capacity for, therefore they cannot sell these cabins for multiple occupancy, even if all of them sold as twins and one as a three share they would have 201 people. Now they must have all sorts of insurances and policies regarding over populating the ship, so if they sell all 100 cabins to families they now have 400 people.

Then we have the second issue, child ages, this is a P&O example, it can vary ship to ship and sailings, this is based on the ventura sailing I looked into a year or so ago. Only nineteen babies? someone asked me why? What would they do if they had 100 babies, the nursery sure could not cope, they would need 100 highchairs/cots and all the other goodies associated with babies, making sense?

Infants 6 – 23 Months ……….19
Tots 24 – 25 months ……….24
3-7 year old ……….88
8 year old ……….30 (Why this age is singled out I have no idea!)
9-12 years old ……….200
13-16 years old ……….300

AGAIN , if you o not want to be disappointed, or not even get on the cruise BOOK EARLY