Cunard Queen Anne’s secrets to help you not get lost…
I’ve just returned from my first cruise onboard Cunard’s brand new ship, Queen Anne. This hasn’t been my first experience of a Cunard ship - I’ve previously cruised on both Queen Elizabeth and the mighty Queen Mary 2, so I now only have one ship left (Queen Victoria) to cruise on before I can say I’ve experienced the entire fleet! Cruising on Queen Anne has taught me that not all of Cunard ships are equal, and this one is very different to its’ predecessors, for a whole host of reasons. I’ll cover these reasons in more detail in other posts, but in this one I’m going to talk about how Cunard are helping their passengers to find their way around this new (and huge) cruise ship.
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Anyway, let’s get started on talking about Queen Anne!
One thing that’s important to note about Queen Anne is that she’s a big girl. She’s 322.5m long, and weighs 113,000 gross tons. She’s got a capacity of 3,000 guests in addition to 1,225 crew, so can carry well in excess of 4,000 at any one time, so she’s a size not to be sniffed at! I often find ships this size quite difficult to navigate, but Cunard have thought of one thing in particular that makes the process of moving around the ship a little easier…
Let’s start with what we’ve seen elsewhere in the industry: P&O Cruises have made the decision to colour-code some of their stairwells, which helps passengers orientate and find their way around by reminding them if they’re at the front/middle/back of the ship. If you’d like to see more about how some other cruise lines make it easier for a passenger to avoid getting lost, you can check out this post. With Cunard being a sister brand to P&O Cruises, it would be unexpected for them not to adopt a similar principle, and I can confirm that they have - the stairwells at the front, middle and back of the ship have been colour coded with blue, yellow and red decor respectively - let me show you…
This logic helps when you know where the elevator lobby is - that way, you know to walk in a certain direction to reach the blue lobby at the front of the ship, for example. However, this is where Cunard have gone one step further, with a system that I haven’t seen before, but it makes perfect sense when you look a little closer.
If you look above in the yellow lobby image, you can see a corridor leading into that lobby, and this corridor features a network of yellow arrows pointing in the same direction. If you’re on any corridor containing passengers cabins onboard Queen Anne, you’re going to find that the carpets here have been specially designed to help you find your way to your nearest lobby. Let me show you:
Not only is the arrow system clever in itself, but adding the colours is a stroke of genius. Providing the passenger remembers that the front lobby is blue, the middle lobby is yellow and the back lobby is red, the arrows can then help them figure out exactly where they want to go. Clever, isn’t it?
Now, look at the decorative boards behind the room numbers in the 2 photos above. You’ll see that, depending on where your room is onboard, the backing colours will be different - another really nice touch to help passengers feel a little more ‘settled’ onboard. Well done, Cunard!
Overall, I found Queen Anne fairly simple to navigate - I’ll be producing a full ship tour for YouTube to help you orientate yourself - just head over there and subscribe to avoid missing out on that! Thank you for taking the time to check out this post - why not check out some more of my Cunard content?