Extending a river cruise at sea

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.

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 homeports, 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.