P&O Cruises To Trial All Inclusive Drinks Package.

For years ‘All Inclusive’ cruising was the limited to high-end brands such as Seabourn and Regent, offering an immersive product where just about everything, including your drinks were included in your cruise fare. More mainstream operators followed suit, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity and MSC Cruises started offering All Inclusive Drinks Packages, sometimes at a fee, sometimes as part of special promotional campaigns to incentivise bookings.

Even the more traditional operators like Fred Olsen and Cruise and Maritime Voyages followed suit. Norwegian Cruise Lines ended up making the switch to offering a completely All Inclusive product with drinks and tips and yet, with all this focus on alcohol consumption across many of the brands, one operator stood almost alone in not succumbing to the trend of offering an ‘all you can drink’ option. That was the British operator P&O Cruises. Well, things are about to change…….sort of.

P&O Cruises have decided to trial an All Inclusive Drinks Package, for a short while only to see how this would be received and also to see if their product has the capacity and indeed the requirement for such a move. So, a trial will be running on Azura only from the 21st July 2018 for a 1 month period and following this trial period a full review will be undertaken. A decision will then be made to understand if this is something P&O Cruises should implement across the entire fleet (potentially from 2019 onwards).

It’s not exactly an ‘all you can drink’ option, check out a brief summary of inclusions/exclusions below.

The package can only be booked onboard and not via the cruise personaliser in advance of travel (this must be confirmed by the end of the 2nd day onboard) and for £39.95 per person per day includes the following.

An extensive selection of beers, single measure spirits, cocktails and wines by the glass up to £6.95 per glass. Unlimited draft soft drinks, mocktails, primo Costa coffees, teapigs teas, hot chocolates and small bottled water (500ml only). A 20% discount on the following items: drinks above £6.95 per glass, bottles of wine, large bottles of water, canned and bottled soft drinks, juices and smoothies. Also, anyone travelling in the same cabin under 16 years of age will receive the Children’s Drinks Package at no additional cost.

Exclusions/restrictions include adults assigned to the same cabin must purchase the drinks package as sharing of packages is not permitted. Only available on cruises of five nights or more and must be purchased for every day of the cruise. Alcoholic drinks are limited to 15 beverages per 24-hour period (6 am to 6 am) and only one drink at a time may be ordered (minimum 15-minute wait between orders).

So there you have it, P&O Cruises may also be offering an All Inclusive Drinks Package in the near future, subject to the finding of the trial of course. I do find it interesting as P&O have only recently put new restrictions on alcohol consumption in place on some of its sailings, presumably to limit the number of drinks consumed, and here we have a trial offering up to 15 beers/wines and/or spirits to any one person on any given evening……

Do you think P&O Cruises are doing the right thing with this trial, should they offer an All Inclusive Drinks Package? On the other hand should P&O stand out from the cruie crowd by being one of the few cruise lines not offering such a product? Does the fact that they currently don’t set them apart from the rest anyway?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Bye for now.