Back on 15th July 2025, we booked our first cruise. It all came from something Debs and I had joked about for years, which then became rather more serious, rather quickly, while we were sitting in the travel agents!
We've always said that, when we get old, rather than moving into a care home we'll just set off on a world cruise instead. Accommodation and food are paid for, there are medical teams on standby and we'd get to spend our time travelling between different countries and continents. Best of all, it might actually work out cheaper than living in a care home in the UK.
We've actually researched this. A nice care home in the UK, and by "nice" I mean somewhere with a large room, potentially a small kitchenette, pet-friendly accommodation, a bar or cafe, hairdressers, gardens, shops nearby and ideally somewhere close to the coast, will set you back around £6,500 to £9,500 per month. That's £78,000 to £114,000 a year, per person. Compare that with a 12-month worldwide cruise and the numbers aren't a million miles apart. I've had quotes of between £70,000 and £100,000 per person for luxury, all-inclusive cruises (researched August 2026), so the cruise could even work out slightly cheaper.
Suddenly, cruising the high seas in our old age doesn't sound quite as daft as it first did.
There was, however, one fairly major flaw in our retirement plan: neither of us knew whether we actually liked cruises.
So, in July 2025, we wandered into our local Hays Travel intending to book something short and cheap to find out. In my head I was thinking maybe five days around the Channel Islands or something similar. Somehow that became seven nights, then we were told that moving up to 12 nights would only cost us around another £500... and before we knew it, we'd booked that instead.
We eventually walked out having booked a 12-night cruise on Cunard's Queen Anne, taking in the Azores, Portugal and Spain.
Let's hope we like it!
The Cunard Queen Anne
These modern cruise ships are truly magnificent. They're basically floating towns. Queen Anne can carry up to 3,000 guests and has 1,225 crew, meaning there could be more than 4,200 people on board at once. Put another way, she can have more people aboard than live in plenty of English villages and small towns.
Cunard's Queen Anne: Core Stats
Let's take a look at just how big this ship actually is.
- Passenger Capacity: Up to 3,000 guests
- Crew Members: 1,225
- Total Capacity: Over 4,200 people
- Gross Tonnage: 113,000 GT
- Length: 322.5m (1,058 feet)
- Height: 64m above the waterline
- Decks: 14
If, like us, you still struggle to picture the scale of this ship, think about it this way. At 322.5m long, she is longer than The Shard in London is tall at around 310m, and longer than three standard football pitches laid end to end. Standing 64m above the waterline, she reaches roughly the height of a 20-storey building. I mean, the numbers alone are phenomenal... I can't wait to see her in real life!
In the world of modern mega-ships, though, Queen Anne isn't actually one of the monsters. Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas, for example, comes in at around 250,800 GT, more than twice the gross tonnage of Queen Anne, and can carry up to 7,600 guests.
Cunard operates on a rather different scale. Queen Anne is currently the largest ship in the Cunard fleet by passenger capacity, while Queen Mary 2 is longer and heavier. The latter is also a very different beast, built as a proper ocean liner for routes including the regular transatlantic crossing rather than simply as a cruise ship.
And for one final comparison, this is the Queen Anne against the Titanic!
Cruise Preparation
When we booked our first cruise, we hadn't really appreciated just how much preparation would go into it.
Insurance
Apparently, for a cruise you need insurance that specifically includes cruise cover, so that was another thing to sort before we travelled.
Clothes
Oh man! Navigating that late-season weather strategy has been a bit of a mare! It's possible that we could experience crisp 8°C sea air on the promenade deck leaving the UK to a temperate 18–20°C in the Azores ... how do you plan for that on a ship!
We have 12 nights and 11 days, six sea days, an overnight stay in one port, single days in three others, travelling in early November and three Gala Evenings thrown into the mix... it makes packing clothes slightly more complicated than your average holiday. I think layering might be important.
We've had to think about what we're likely to need during the day, what the weather might be like in each port, what to wear in the evenings and then pull all of that together into a buying and packing list.
We've also added another layer of complexity ourselves because we're very aware that this is a Cunard cruise. For us, that means making a bit of an effort and respecting the dress code and standards on board, particularly in the evenings.
Drinks Package
We knew when we booked the cruise that we'd probably want a drinks package, although once again it wasn't quite as straightforward as it first sounded.
As a couple, we would both need to book the same package. I like a drink, Debs doesn't really drink alcohol, so the obvious compromise was to go with one of the alcohol-free packages rather than pay for an alcoholic package that only one of us would properly use.
The Premium Alcohol-Free Package includes things such as mocktails, milkshakes, soft drinks and non-alcoholic beers, wines and spirits, so we decided that would add a little extra to the holiday.
What we hadn't quite appreciated was how much that little extra would cost.
At US $40.50 (£30.60) per person, per day, our Premium Alcohol-Free Package has cost us £734.40!
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