Booking a cruise on Vacations To Go is deceptively easy, especially for a total beginner like me. You find a cruise you like, copy down its' I.D. Number and call someone in Atlanta (I'm guessing...it's somewhere down that way judging by the accent of the very nice lady who answered), with your Visa card in your hot little hand. You tell her what kind of cabin you want, she confirms it's available, you give her your card details, you're done. A confirming email will soon be sent. Wow, you're a cruiser in ten minutes. And you've saved a ton of money because VacToGo does discount a lot.
What she didn't tell you but the email did, is that VacToGo sells and guarantees a room in your preferred category, not a specific room with a number that you can find on a deck plan. That detail isn't given to you until a few days before you sail and by that time you're pretty well stuck with what they give you. That may be fine for the majority of passengers but in our case it was definitely not because we had purchased TWO cabins, and requested that they be near each other. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what a big company like P&O might do with a request like ours.
But they surprised us! They sent us the final room assignments a week before we flew out and amazingly enough, they were quite close to each other. Not adjacent, but close enough, on the same deck even. Happy, happy.
Fast forward three days. Oops, head office had made a boo-boo.
I have to back up and explain something here. Our cruise was really two cruises back-to-back. The first leg sailed from Southampton to Genoa. The second sailed seamlessly from Genoa to Venice. P&O had assumed, without really looking  at our booking, I guess, that we had only wanted the first leg, disembarking at Genoa. So, because we wanted to go all the way to Venice, they could no longer offer us the cabins we had been given, due to a previous commitment to people embarking at Genoa (a.k.a. Full paying passengers).
A flurry of emails and calls between us and VacToGo and between VacToGo and P&O resulted only in a promise that they would do their best to assign us two cabins close to each other but that they could not do that until very close to the day of sailing. So we flew out of Vancouver without knowing our cabin assignments, trusting that they would live up to their promise...