P&O releases new itineraries to replace Oceana’s Dubai winter cruise season

Just a few days after making the unprecedented announcement that they were cancelling Oceana’s 2019/2020 cruise season in Dubai, P&O Cruises has released a new set of winter itineraries for the ship.

Oceana will sail 14 cruises to five different regions between October, 2019 and April, 2020, including seven itineraries to the British cruise favourites of Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands.

She’ll also cruise twice to Northern Europe and will do one long roundtrip trans-Atlantic cruise from Southampton to the Caribbean.

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These cruises are book-ended by repositioning cruises to and from Malta which include calls at Rome and Barcelona.

The new itineraries will replace Oceana’s planned Dubai cruise season for the 2019 and 2020 winter. The British cruise line cancelled the season earlier this month due to geopolitical tensions between Iran and the West.

“The increased tension in the region highlighted by the attacks on tankers in the Straits and the detention of a British-flagged tanker by the Iranian authorities means as a British company flying the Red Ensign it is not advisable for us to maintain our planned Dubai and Arabian Gulf programme this winter season,” Paul Ludlow, President, P&O Cruises, said at the time.

Highlights of the new cruise itineraries include a 14-night cruise from Southampton to Lanzarote, Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Madeira, Lisbon and La Coruna starting at £999 per person, and an Atlantic Islands cruise calling at Madeira, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Seville (from Cadiz) and Lisbon starting at £499 per person.

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There’s also a 35-night Caribbean cruise roundtrip from Southampton which includes a partial transit of the Panama Canal, where Oceana will traverse the lock system and head in to Gatun Lake, before returning to the Caribbean Sea.

Another 35-night Caribbean cruise, departing November 17^th, 2019, will sail from Southampton and visit the Azores, Antigua, St Maarten, Montego Bay, Grand Cayman, Roatan, Puerto Limon, Aruba, Martinique and Barbados. Princes for this cruise start at £1,499 per person.

While P&O Cruises is the first cruise line ever to cancel a full Dubai cruise season, Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises have confirmed their Dubai cruise itineraries will go ahead, as have MSC Cruises, Costa Cruises, TUI and AIDA.

P&O Cruises is due to return Oceana to the Middle East for next year’s 2020/21 cruise season out of Dubai, while Celebrity Cruises has pulled Constellation from the region during the same period for reasons it says are unrelated to Iran.