In this episode of Luxury Unpacked, host Fiona Dalton sits down with Steve Richards, managing director of AmaWaterways Australia and New Zealand, to unpack a category carrying an image that has not caught up with the product.
River cruising is still described in some quarters as slower, quieter, a holiday for a certain age. Richards has spent two and a half years championing a different view, and the numbers now do a lot of the arguing for him. The average AmaWaterways river cruiser is in their 50s. On the dedicated wine sailings it is younger again. The line was the first to put bicycles on board.
Fiona, who has run a river cruise company herself, is not an easy audience, and that is what makes this a useful conversation rather than a brand tour. They work through the myths one at a time: who actually books a river cruise now, how much there is to do in a day, what luxury means on a ship where the hardware can only be so grand, and why the food comes from within 15 kilometres of the riverbank and the freezers hold nothing but ice cream.
They also get practical. Balcony or window, and when the difference is worth paying for. What really happens when ships raft up three deep in Vienna. Solo staterooms with no supplement, and the seating trick at dinner that does more for solo travellers than any of it. Laundry, dietaries, and how far ahead to book.
Then there is the scale story. AmaWaterways is heading from 31 ships to more than 50 by 2032, with vessels on the Nile, the Mekong, the Chobe in Botswana and the Magdalena in Colombia, a river no passenger ship had worked since the coffee barges of the 1960s. Seven years of research went into putting one back.
For the traveller who has written river off, and for the advisor fielding that objection from a client, this is a useful 42 minutes on how far the category has moved and how much of the old script is now out of date.
Start planning at amawaterways.com/au
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Read more about this episode Rolling on the River: The rebirth of luxury river cruising with AmaWaterways' Steve Richards here
Discover more from the Karryon Podcast Network:
Into the Hearts of Canada here
The Karryon Check-In with Matt Leedham here
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Luxury Unpacked is a Karryon Podcast Network original show, hosted by Fiona Dalton and executive produced by Matt Leedham.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the many Countries and Nations in which this show is made and travels, and we pay our respects to Elders past and present.
