We have carefully selected and partnered with a cruated list of cruise lines that we feel represent the quality, comfort and value best suited for our clients. Avalon Waterways, Belmond Cruises, Ecoventura, European Waterways, Four Season Yachts, Lindblad Expeditions, Ritz Carlton Yacht Collection, Seabourn, SeaDream, Silversea, Tauck, Uniworld, and Viking River Cruises as well as a few more all meet our guidelines to be a part of the SmallShipTravel.com community.
We don't recommend ships we haven't sailed. This is our policy and our practice. What follows is a selection of our team's personal voyage log — the ships we've been aboard recently, what we found when we got there, and what the experience means for the recommendations we make.
Romance in travel isn't a category. It's a quality. It's not produced by a sunset dinner package or a rose-petal turndown. It comes from being somewhere extraordinary with someone you love, in conditions that remove the noise of daily life and replace it with beauty and time. Small ships do this better than almost any other form of travel.
A hotel barge carries 6 to 20 guests. It moves at walking pace along canals so narrow that branches brush the hull. The chef bought the cheese from the producer's farm that morning. The wines are from the vineyard you visited after lunch. At 5 PM the barge ties up for the night in a village with a restaurant that has been open since 1952. This is the most intimate, most food-centered, and most genuinely French form of travel available.
For four centuries, the Northwest Passage — the sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans — was the object of the most determined and most deadly quest in the history of exploration. Ships were lost. Men died. The Passage defeated everyone who attempted it until Roald Amundsen succeeded in 1903, taking three years to complete what expedition ships now do in three weeks.
Cabin selection on a small ship is more consequential than on a large ship for a simple reason: you'll spend more time in it. When a ship carries 92 guests rather than 4,000, the common areas are more intimate, the cabin is more frequently a retreat, and the proportional difference in quality between cabin categories is more pronounced.
The Galapagos Islands are the only place on Earth where a marine iguana will walk across your feet without breaking stride, where a blue-footed booby will perform its mating dance three feet from your camera, and where a sea lion pup will follow you along the beach out of pure curiosity. This is not wildlife viewing. This is wildlife coexistence.
Reach out to our travel concierges today to create your perfect journey.
