P&O MS Arvia; Sunday, 06 September, 2026

We were up well before we needed to be down for breakfast, which was at least vaguely edible, if not particularly tasty, and at least it didn’t repeat into the morning.

We had a taxi booked from the hotel round to the terminal booked for 10:45, but he was already waiting outside for us when we got back down to hotel reception to checkout just after 10:30. It was a quick journey across town to the Ocean Terminal where our assigned checkin time was 11:00, so we were quite early, but it meant we were able to drop the bags off and headed for the queue.

Mum hadn’t booked assistance, as she hadn’t needed it the previous year at the Mayflower terminal for the Arcadia, but neither of us had appreciated quite how much bigger the Arvia was, and therefore how much bigger the terminal would be.

Whilst they weren’t able to provide full assistance, the terminal team were fantastic at getting lots of shortcuts through the process so that mum had to walk the minimum, and within about 10 minutes of entering the building we were sat in our holding area awaiting our turn through security and boarding.

We had to wait there for about 20 minutes before we were called forward and less than 10 minutes later we were on the ship and heading to the restaurant for lunch, given that our cabins wouldn’t be available for a little while longer.

After lunch we had a little wander through the ship to get our bearings, heading up to the top deck, before the announcement went out that cabins were ready, and as we were by lifts at the time took the opportunity to head straight down to ours to settle in.

The bags arrives a little while later and after unpacking I went for a wander around more of the ship to look over all the options on the decks from the top to the bottom, before heading back to the cabin to watch the sail away on our balconies, with the much better weather than the previous year meaning we could actually see the Hampshire coast slowly slip away beside us.

By the time we reached The Solent it was getting close to dinner time, so we headed down to a bar for a drink and to get ourselves into the virtual queue for dinner. The previous year on the Arcadia with just one main restaurant and the buffet we were often finding ourselves well into the 130s in the queue, but on this much larger ship, with many more options, we never joined the queue above the low 40s and on most nights had a table in less than 10 minutes, so on the first night we had to drink up slightly more quickly than we were expecting before heading down to the restaurant.

After dinner we both headed back to our cabins as it had been quite a long day, particularly with the bad nights sleep the night before, so we both decided on early nights.