Our Cruise Was CANCELLED After 4 Hours Onboard

I've just disembarked what may be the shortest and weirdest cruise in history on a ship that was planned to be scrapped in 2020 she was saved from the scrap yard by a new British Cruise Line and I booked a three-night mini break on her our cruise was canceled four hours after we boarded and in total we only spent eight hours on the ship in that eight hours though we had more problems than we would normally have on a full two-week cruise we boarded the ship in London Tilbury and we were planning on heading to Bruges for the Christmas markets embarkation was pretty easy and despite the bad weather we were really excited to get on board I picked up my cruise card which is the thing you used to get into your room to buy your drinks pretty much everything on board it's a very very important card my friends Justin and Tristan were told that they'd have to get theirs on board because they weren't ready yet no big deal we thought it is non-common on a cruise for things to be a bit delayed the problem was much much bigger than that but at this point we didn't realize how widespread it was as soon as we embarked the ship we entered a beautiful Atrium it was decorated for Christmas and it looked fantastic despite the ship being from 1991 everything here looked new and I hope that the rest of the ship would be as nice as this area I didn't have particularly high expectations after reading review after review about broken toilets broken air conditioning but this area at least definitely surpassed my expectations one of my favorite things about cruising is when you first step on a new cruise ship it's so exciting you run around and you try and explore everything as fast as you can in hindsight I'm very glad I did that on this Cruise because we would not have a chance to look around later we found a big Pub area called the purple turtle which I've since found out used to be a casino in the UK we don't really gamble as much as other places so if a British Cruise Line buys an American or an Australian cruise ship they normally replace the big casino with one that is much much smaller this ship was originally launched in 1991 for Princess Cruises as Regal Princess and she spent most of her life at specific Dawn for piano Australia as I was wandering around these public areas I thought to myself wow Ambassador have really done a great job renovating these spaces I've since had a look at the Pacific Dawn ship tours and I think I should be giving a lot of the credit to p o instead of Ambassador because most of the inside spaces haven't changed even the picture frames have not changed this is from 2019 when the ship was Pacific Dawn and this is a picture that I took when I was on board this ship not that that's necessarily A Bad Thing pno Australia did a really good job with the ship in all the areas that they renovated in 2017. Ambassador did make a few changes they took down the water slides they took down the rock climbing wall they are aiming at the 50 plus market and clearly they decided that people who are 50 plus don't need water slides they did add the skull of a whale actually they had a couple of skulls on board but my friends never found these during our day so they were very very confused when I went back to them and told them that I just found some skulls it was around now that there was an announcement saying that we would be delayed leaving Tilbury because there was an annual safety check happening on board we didn't really think anything else of it it was already dark it didn't really matter to us when we were sailing away there was never going to be a big sail away party like you might have on a cruise in the Caribbean it was raining outside it was very very cold and it just looked miserable I am glad that I braved the rain though to have a quick look around the top deck because this would be the only chance that I would get I didn't know it at the time but I had about two hours until my cruise would be canceled I met my friends in the buffet because we were getting pretty hungry by this point the buffet design was really really lovely and it was more like a food court than a buffet where everything is served to you next up was our safety drill which everybody has to do by law it was the old style safety drill where you stand around in a lounge and listen to information but it didn't take very long and it was fine I did hear one person genuinely asking the crew are the toilets meant to flush I've not found anyone here that do there definitely seem to be a problem with the toilets and well over half the people on board either didn't have a cruise card or they had one that didn't work yet as it would turn out some people would never get their Cruise cards before they disembark the ship we went straight to our cabin and here things did get a little bit weird the cabin was much bigger than I expected and the layout was very similar to that that you'll find on a lot of princess ships which makes sense as she was built for princess the first thing I did was have a look behind this curtain because it looked like there should be a window here I had an inside cabin so there was just nothing and usually you don't have a curtain to nothing but fair enough overall I thought the design of the cabin was nice but there were definitely bits around the room that were grubby and damaged it wouldn't take a lot to change things like these weird handles on the door which honestly make me feel quite sick to look at them they look like dirty rats tails the cabin definitely didn't feel as though it had been refurbished to the same standard as the rest of the ship it was quite a stark difference even when you're in the public areas you'd see the new carpets and then the old carpets side by side it would just stop it was like somebody had run out of money or energy or something during the project it was odd it was around now that I made a very big mistake and I unpacked my suitcase I didn't put anything into the drawers with the weird handles because I didn't want to touch them but we had a big wardrobe space loads of other drawers and a lot more hanging space than you'll normally find on cruise ships in hindsight it was a mistake to unpack but there was no way for me to know that I wouldn't actually spend a night in this cabin one thing I did love about it was that there was a kettle Ambassador are primarily aimed at the British market and we really like our tea and our kettles I'm happy to say that the shower was really big but I didn't get a chance to measure it using my usual toothpaste tube measurements I'm actually happy that I filmed anything in this cabin at all because usually I wait until the end of the cruise to film my cabin tours but maybe something in me knew that this was all gonna go wrong I don't know I got changed for dinner and I met my friends at the Buckingham restaurant we'd been given early dining which I love and we were Seated on a table together which was good the main dining room was huge and we were seated right at the back by the windows at this point we were just chatting about what we would do in Bruges and how we'd found the ship so far the menu didn't have a lot of vegetarian Choice there was only one veggie main but it did have really good allergen markings and on a few of the dishes it said that they were vegan versions available I chose a cheese tart to start followed by bean enchiladas and an after eight dessert it was between our starter and our main that our cruise was canceled my friends who I was eating with Tristan Justin and Lizzy also have YouTube channels and before the cruise they had been in touch with the pr team of Ambassador I usually don't talk too much online about my cruises in advance and I don't want the cruise line to know that I'm there really I want to be as undercover as possible because of that though that meant that I wasn't on the pr email list so everybody else got an email that I didn't get Justin looked at the email on his phone and he said to us our cruise has been canceled to be honest I just thought it was a joke I thought well we're already here this could is definitely hasn't been canceled maybe they mean the next cruise maybe they just got the dates wrong or perhaps we're not going to Brugge I could see that happening but we're already on the cruise you can't cancel a cruise when we're on a cruise or so I thought we were there looking at each other very confused when the overhead announcement came on the all passengers to have left the ship by 9 30. they told us that it was to do with the annual inspection and that they'd found a problem with one of the Lifeboat stations I didn't hear much more of the announcement because everybody in the restaurant started talking because nobody could believe what was going on I have never heard of a cruise ship failing an annual inspection and as far as I can tell the cruise lines know far in advance when these inspections are happening they're not just random so I'm really not sure what went wrong here doing a bit of research I found out this isn't the first time that this ship has failed an inspection she was detained in the UK for failing a PCS inspection which stands for Port State control my dinner was nice the portions were quite small but overall it was a good dinner I could imagine us having some really nice evenings here if our cruise was longer than eight hours we had so many questions at this point and my main one was why can't we just stay on the ship and use it as a floating hotel I think it would have been best if they gave us a refund if we wanted to go home and of course gave us a discount if we wanted to stay on board but they already had all of the food they already had the entertainers they already had the space so to make us leave seemed really really strange I did learn a bit more about what happened as time went on but at this point I was so confused I was quite lucky because I'd only traveled a few hours from home but some people had traveled long distances and they were facing just being left in Tilbury it's called London Tilbury but it's really not London the port of Tilbury is actually the main Port when it comes to importing paper into the UK but that is not a reason to spend three days there it was after this that I found out that the announcement had only been made to the public areas on board the ship that or perhaps some of the systems in the cabins were broken either way though there were plenty of people who were in their rooms who had no idea that this Cruise had been canceled and other guests had to tell them we decided that we wanted to make the most out of our time on board we'd come all this way we might as well have a look at the bars and go to a show in the theater there are 11 different lounges and bars on board and all of the ones that we saw were full of people just making the most out of their first and last evening on board the Bars were beautifully decorated and looking at these areas you would never know that the ship was as old as she was the theater on board has this amazing stage that comes out quite a long way so wherever you're sat in the theater you're pretty close to the singers and dancers the show that we watched was musical related and it was really good I loved it it was only around 35 minutes long but I'm glad that we went to see it I also love the seating where you have these little tables and you can get in or out if you need to I don't know if I was allowed to film the show but to be honest I thought to myself what does it matter what are they gonna do imagine I'm not allowed to film are they going to kick me off the ship didn't make a difference at this point so here's a few Clips I did try and get a drink before this but I was told that they didn't do bar service and I'd have to sit down in the theater to get a drink that meant that throughout the entire show there were people with their Cruise cards in the air trying to get the attention of the waiters it was annoying being sat behind people with their hands in the air for the whole time but to be honest I think they were just really fed up and really wanted a drink I wanted a drink too but not enough to annoy the people behind me for an entire show amazingly the atmosphere on board was not depressing at all it was kind of a let's make the most out of this atmosphere people were dancing they're enjoying themselves and there were two ladies who requested the band to play Sailing by Rod Stewart which was absolutely hilarious we of course changed the words to we're not sailing we're not sailing home again is where we'll be we made the decision to come home late in the evening instead of getting off and trying to drive through London rush hour traffic on a Monday morning we still had so many questions but we wouldn't get answers until a little later we didn't know if we would get compensation would we get a refund I hope so there will be absolute riots would we get our drinks package refunded what happened to the people who were going on the next Cruise was the next Cruise even going to go ahead we had no idea it seemed like the problem was pretty serious but I assumed that they would be able to film it in Tilbury I was wrong on that one I thought Ambassador could just go away kind of revise for the test and then they would pass it but apparently that's not how it works your britishism of the week is the word revise you would say that you are revising for an exam you would go to a revision class is and that's studying but it's specifically going over things that you've already learned revising we found a letter in our cabin that said that we would be able to get a refund or we could take future Cruise credit with a discount on a future Cruise I'm definitely not saying never to another Ambassador cruise but I don't have any plans to do one I'm not going to rush back and do one soon so I decided to take the refund I'm actually going to use the refund to upgrade my next Cruise cabin from an inside to a balcony I think that'll be a nice treat luckily our room keys were working so we could go back and pack ready to leave I did meet people who were in the corridors trying to find the crew who could let them into their cabins because at 10 pm they still didn't have Cruise cards that worked and there were a lot of people like that not so much of a problem if you can wander off to find the crew to let you in but if you're somebody who can't walk very well you can't stand for long periods I imagine that would be very very annoying I also felt bad for my cabin neighbor who had decorated their cabin door for Christmas and then had to take it all down a couple of hours later on the plus side it was perhaps the easy is this embarkation that I've ever had on a cruise we walked straight off I've since found out that the next Cruise after ours has also been canceled which is a shame that was a 15 night cruise it was not cheap and it was supposed to be sailing over Christmas so they've canceled that one too because the ship is actually going all the way back to the shipyard for repairs it seems weird to have to go to the shipyard to fix something with the Lifeboat station but I don't know much about repairing cruise ships so we'll let them decide what they need to do I'm sure Ambassador didn't take the decision lightly but cruise lines of course have to put safety first cruise lines have a lot of rules that they have to follow to make sure that the ships are safe and some of those rules came into Force after an accident on board the Star Princess where 23 of its cabins were destroyed to find out what happened in that accident and how that has changed the industry since watch this video next

Channel: Emma Cruises

Views: 1,794,728

Keywords: cruise, cruise tips, emma cruises

Id: jppzHpO_8xU

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022