LINERS and CRUISE SHIPS, a question of ignoring hundreds of years of maritime culture and history

These two photos were taken on board the brand new P & O CRUISES "BRITANNIA" back in March this year while visiting the ship on the eve of her maiden voyage with paying customers. Couldn't escape to notice that between the two funnels, there is a board with the name of her cruising operator instead of the ship's name. This type of boards always used to sport the ship's name during the years of the Liners, when passenger Liners were the pride and ambassadors of nations, a time when Countries used to compete to build the biggest, the fastest or the most luxurious Liner in the World, some current cruise ships, still maintain the tradition. Market has changed, today there are no Liner voyages apart from CUNARD's QUEEN MARY 2 offering North Atlantic crossings from the UK to the U.S.A., today passenger ships are managed, monitored to transport thousands of passengers for cruising, a form of a Holiday at sea, offering visits to different countries without the need of changing hotels, all of this is nowadays fine, times are different, there is no need for liners, the necessity is now focused on building passenger ships that are able to transport up to 6000 passengers that are travelling with cruising operators, P & O CRUISES, RCI, NCL, COSTA CRUISES and so on, the name of the ship is now of second importance, the idea is for customers to go on a competition about cruising companies, shame to realize that the identity and culture of the passenger ship is a thing of the past, even companies like P & O CRUISES with 177 years of tradition completely ignore their past, real shame to see the names of the ships being relegated to second plan, but on a different note, BRITANNIA is a success in the making, the ship is beautiful and will possibly become one of the most important ships in modern cruising. Photos at Southampton, 13.3.2015