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Luxury river operator Aqua Expeditions has announced that it will be renovating its two Peruvian Amazon vessels, the Aqua Amazon and the Aria Amazon. The upgrades are being overseen by the boats’ original designer, Peruvian architect Jordi Puig.
The vessels’ exteriors will be outfitted with new woodwork, a fresh coat of paint and new awnings. New wood flooring has been installed throughout most common areas. Additionally, all the suites are being redone with new floors, furniture and amenities, and the bathrooms with new floors and tiles. Both vessels feature newly upholstered furniture, new wall coverings and lighting. New skiffs have also been added on each vessel that seat up to 10 passengers.
Aqua Expeditions was founded eight years ago when it launched the 12-suite Aqua Amazon, which was followed by the 16-suite Aria Amazon. In October 2014, Aqua Expeditions launched a third luxury river cruise vessel, the 20-suite Aqua Mekong, on the Mekong River in Southeast Asia.
Adventures by Disney river cruises will be operated by AmaWaterways.
After announcing last month that it is launching river cruises through a partnership with AmaWaterways, Adventures by Disney has already added two more departures "due to popularity and mass interest in the program."
Originally, Disney’s tour operator arm said it would offer four sailings along the Danube River during summer 2016, and one holiday-themed sailing in December 2016. There will now be five sailings in the summer, as well as two sailings in December of 2016. The itineraries will travel through Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary.
Adventures by Disney will charter the 170-passenger AmaViola, a ship that is launching in 2016 and is being custom-built to cater to families. Family-friendly features on the AmaViola will be six sets of connecting staterooms, as well as some rooms and suites that can accommodate families of three or four people.
There will be wine tastings, fine dining, music, dancing and an onboard fitness center geared toward adults, and movies, karaoke, relay games, chess lessons on an oversized board, video games and themed nights for young children and teens.
There will be eight Adventures by Disney guides on each sailing in addition to the AmaWaterways crew.
The Adventures by Disney sailings will take place July 7, 14, 21, 28, Aug. 4, Dec. 15 and 22.
Adventures by Disney, which launched in 2005, offers 30 guided vacations on six continents.
It seems almost inevitable. The river cruise season gets underway and then either high or low water levels due to heavy rains or lack thereof cause some disruptions. And this season is no exception.
Since the start of the month, river cruise lines have been dealing with higher than normal water levels on Europe’s Rhine, Danube, Rhone and Seine rivers, which forced several river cruise lines to alter some of their itineraries.
Michelle Baran
The challenge is that there is no telling when or how severely these highs and lows will happen. But river cruise passengers should perhaps be made aware of the possibility and of the ways in which high or low water levels could impact their trip, because as we have seen year in and year out, some disruptions, however minor, almost always occur at some point in the season.
“So far, it doesn’t seem to have deterred clients from river cruising but if these dramatic rain or drought weather patterns continue with more and more sailings affected, it may start to have an impact in the future,” said Linda Dinsmore, a river and small ship specialist who runs the website The River Cruise Lady.
Dinsmore admitted that she doesn’t talk to clients about water levels before they take a river cruise, and that so far clients haven’t been asking about water levels, “so I think it’s a situation that you hope doesn’t happen.”
That said, she had clients that ran into some issues last week on the where they were driven further up the river to board their ship due to the higher waters, an adjustment that “was not too disruptive,” she noted.
When water levels are higher than normal, river cruise vessels can’t squeeze under the low bridges they need to bypass to complete their sailings, and when water levels are low they can’t sail through shallower waters where there isn’t enough clearance for the ships’ drafts. So, each river cruise line undertakes a variety of contingency plans when this happens, including (but not limited to) busing passengers to ports and destinations they can’t reach by ship, having them stay in a hotel for an extra night or two if the ship cannot get to them, or having passengers swap ships, which entails boarding another ship on the other side of an impassable bridge or stretch of water, a strategy Viking River Cruises employed for this most recent water rise.
Viking said on its website that it has contacted guests whose cruises need to be adjusted due to this month’s higher water levels, including those on the May 13 Passage to Eastern Europe cruise aboard Viking Lif, which is now taking place on sister ship, Viking Aegir; and those on the May 13 Grand European Tour aboard Viking Aegir, which is now taking place on sister ship, Viking Lif. (Viking said it does not anticipate any further itinerary changes beyond these sailings.)
While this season’s disruptions are nowhere near the mayhem caused by the historic floods in Europe two years back, they serve as a reminder that river cruising, despite all its potential and success, still has some notable vulnerabilities. And while river cruise companies have grown very accustomed to working around water-level issues, for customers the required itinerary changes can still serve as a disappointment if they weren’t made aware of the possibility in advance.
“The mainstream cruise lines are getting better at handling these conditions and it’s not something that occurs too often or for too long when it does,” said Pete Larson, owner of River Cruise Guru. But, he added, “I always advise my clients about fluctuating river levels and how it could affect their cruise … Many new river cruisers come from the ocean cruise market where this isn’t something they may have experienced or thought about.”
Many of the passengers I shared a voyage with recently on the new Viking Star ocean cruise ship were past passengers on Viking’s river cruise vessels.
I was surprised to hear from more than one of them that river cruises in general are too short.
Unlike on the ocean, where one can find world cruises of more than 100 days, river cruises are limited by the length of the river they sail on and rarely span more than two weeks.
Tom Stieghorst
One woman said that to justify the trouble of packing, taking an overseas flight with all of the security and customs procedures that involves, and adjusting to jet lag in Europe, she wanted to vacation for longer than a typical river cruise allows.
This woman had enjoyed a 15-day river cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest, and said she wouldn’t mind doing the reverse cruise back-to-back in order to get more mileage from her overseas trip.
Mind you, nearly one third of the passengers on my cruise from Istanbul had signed on for a full 50-night, 33-port grand ocean tour of Europe that will finish in Stockholm at the end of May.
So clearly, while there is some overlap between ocean and river cruise customers, there’s a certain contingent that prefers a longer voyage than is possible on the average river itinerary.
One solution is to combine the two, a concept that first launched last fall when Celebrity Cruises linked up with river operator Amras Cruises to create ocean-and-river cruise packages.
Viking could take that idea to the next level by being one company that offers both types of cruises.
There is already a lot of conversation about the topic at Viking's headquarters in Los Angeles, according to Sara Conley, Viking's director of public relations and social media, who added that it is logistically more difficult than it might appear.
Ocean and river cruises do not share many home ports, so there might be land transfers involved between one ship and the other. And the schedules of the two sides of the cruise business were not designed with coordination in mind, so they don’t necessarily match up in convenient ways.
At this point, Viking has just one ocean ship, the 930-passenger Star. Next year it expects to have another delivered, with a third to follow either late in 2016 or early 2017.
By that time Viking may have figured out a solution to offering the combo cruise that would give some passengers both a river cruise and a more extended cruise vacation in Europe.
For those of us steeped in the world of river cruising, the fact that river cruising is a hot trend is old news.
But last week Virtuoso released the results of its annual survey of travel advisors, who for the first time picked river cruising as the top trend for the coming year, beating out heavyweights such as multigenerational travel, adventure travel and celebration trips.
Clearly, there are still plenty of travelers and travel sellers who are only just now discovering and fully embracing river cruising as a travel style, which indicates that it likely has a long journey of growth ahead of it, despite the rapid rate at which Viking Cruises and others have been churning out new river cruise vessels in Europe and farther afield in recent years.
Michelle Baran
While it may seem like there is only so much that the river cruising segment can grow, the Virtuoso survey results are a reminder that in many ways the segment is arguably still in its infancy.
With demand and hype still strong, we can only expect to see more new ship announcements in Europe as well as further development of exotic river destinations such as Myanmar’s Irrawaddy and India’s Ganges. We can anticipate that some more new players will try to enter the market and that the competition will become even fiercer. I see greater design innovation and even more amenities on the horizon.
Perhaps there will come a time when we all realize that river cruising isn’t just a hot, new trend, but that it is here to stay; dynamic and permanent fixture of the travel industry. What has been a booming trend over the last several years, will eventually just be a travel reality.
Celebrity Cruises packages combine ocean and river voyages
By Tom Stieghorst
Celebrity Cruises said it will offer 11 itineraries next year that combine an ocean cruise with a river cruise in Europe.
The fully commissionable packages range from 16 to 24 nights and will be available on four well-known rivers: the Danube, Rhine, Rhone and Seine. Celebrity's river cruise partner is Amras Cruises.
“By introducing these river-and-ocean cruise packages, travellers can immerse themselves in Europe more so than ever before, with the ease of choosing a vacation package exclusively created by Celebrity,” said the cruise line's president, Michael Bayley.
The deluxe packages will be sold with airfare, pre-cruise hotel stays, transfers and a beverage package, making them similar to a luxury cruise in concept.
River cruising across continents -- the same, but different
By Michelle Baran
Whenever anyone would ask me about the similarities between river cruising in Europe and river cruising in other parts of the world, I used to answer one of two ways.
Half the time, I responded with something along the lines of, “No matter where you are in the world, river cruising is basically the same.” The other half, I said something like, “Aside from the fact that it’s a river cruise, that’s where the similarities end. Totally different experience depending on where you are.”
In truth, both are correct. (And I’ve started responding with a combination of the two, for the record. Apologies to those I misled prior to this new policy.)
As the river cruising industry shifts its focus from a busy launch season in Europe this spring, toward a slew of newbuilds coming out in Southeast Asia this fall, the change in destination backdrop begs for some comparisons between river cruising in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Indeed, Europe has set the standard for river cruising in the world. It’s where the market is most developed, it’s the product that is marketed the heaviest, and it’s usually the destination where people often first learn about and experience river cruising.
It sets the bar, so to speak. And then, passengers get the river cruise line’s brochure and see that they might have a ship that sails the Mekong in Vietnam and Cambodia, or that they offer an itinerary on the Peruvian Amazon. That’s when things start getting interesting.
Maybe they find out from some friends they can even river cruise right here at home on the Mississippi or Columbia rivers. Who knew?
The question is, will they like these other river cruises if they liked river cruising in Europe? Well, first off, let’s address what will be the same or similar between European river cruising and its numerous cousins scattered about the globe.
For one, the floating-hotel notion is similar. During the river cruise portion of their itinerary, regardless of the destination, passengers will pack and unpack once and their river cruise ship/floating hotel will carry them from one destination to the next, often to small ports from which they can walk into the nearby town.
Additionally, floating on down the river offers a very similar sensation regardless of whether that river is the Mississippi, the Nile, the Irrawaddy or the Danube. Of course the scenery along the river will vary greatly, but that peaceful, gliding feeling is almost universal.
As for what’s different, the ships themselves, for one. There are vastly different types of river cruise vessels suitable for different rivers. European river cruisers might be surprised to find how large the river cruise ships in the U.S. and China are, or how small those in Southeast Asia and Peru are.
And of course, the destinations themselves are where many of the differences are. The bustling river life in Vietnam and Cambodia is nothing like the more reserved rivers of Europe. Floating past Egyptian desert landscapes is quite different from sailing past quaint American towns.
But despite all the differences, I could totally see how someone could love river cruising across continents. Because really, it’s the same. But different.
