No More Wine Waiters On P&O

I’ve been reading some reports that P&O is phasing out the wine waiters in the main dining rooms – indeed, this may already have been done on some ships. Instead, the table waiters will take an order for wine.

I’m not sure what I think about this. One the one hand there have been times when I’ve enjoyed the conversations with the wine waiters, and I have a feeling that the table waiters won’t be able to give the advice, etc, that the better wine waiters could. On the other hand, there have been frequent occasions when we were waiting a long time for the wine waiter to appear – some times we were eating our first course before we’d even been able to order the wine, let alone start drinking it. (Not the wine waiters’ fault, they always seemed to have too many tables to serve.) So I can see advantages in this move as well as disadvantages. One answer would be to use the wine line to order wine in advance, but we don’t always want to drink a whole bottle, and of course there are times when we want different wines.