When is the Midnight Buffet?

On most cruise lines – never! Cunard's Queen Elizabeth 2 still has one. Carnival Line offers one on some cruises that extend for longer than seven days. Royal Caribbean Line certainly still offers them and Celebrity still holds them but only on a few ships. Princess line removed its midnight buffet at least a decade ago, replacing it with a late-night bistro and 24-hour room service. Norwegian Cruise Lines offers a Chocoholic buffet, but not at midnight and Holland America has followed suit with a Chocolate Extravaganza at suppertime.

Princess says that 24-hour dining means it doesn’t need to corral its customers into one place for one meal, and that anyway, free and easy cruise passengers prefer to choose when and what they eat. This seems to be largely true. Chefs work for days preparing 910 pounds of food for the gala midnight buffet on a Carnival vessel. Most Carnival ships can carry around 3,000 passengers and about half of them attend the midnight buffet. But only 20% of them actually eat – the others are just there to take pictures!

The new P&O ship Ventura, often described as a superliner, is certainly aiming at the Cool Britannia market. With superchef Marco Pierre White providing the menus and supergallery Tate Modern providing the art, this ship is squarely focused on a young, hip British traveller. Even some of the events planned are utterly British, most ships have a spa and a comedy club, a cirque du soleil style circus school for teens is an interesting option but surely only a British ship could contain Noddy events for toddlers and a super-scale Scalextric track! If this sounds like your idea of heaven, the thirteen day cruise from Southampton to the Canaries, leaving on August 31, will cost £1,119. This price is full-board and includes attendance at those oh-so-cool kids’ clubs and activities – and access to the Scalextric for Dads!