Tom Stieghorst
There's a lot of good cruise journalism out there. (Some of it even resides outside the pages of Travel Weekly!) I recently came across three examples that fall into the category of "I Wish I Had Written That."
• If you're interested in the aesthetic side of cruise ships, make it a point to check out "USA Today Picks: The world's 25 most beautiful cruise vessels."
Author Peter Knego is one of the true authorities on cruise ship design and interiors, and his taste clearly leans toward the smaller, older ships, but there are bigger, newer ships (Celebrity Solstice class, Queen Mary 2) on the list, too.
Part of the fun is discovering ships you didn't know existed, ships that might be a good fit for clients looking for something different. You can read about the SS Legacy (No. 24), the Adriana (No. 23) or Lofoten (No. 19). The latter is a Hurtigruten ship built in 1964 whose gorgeous wood interiors don't fall afoul of international fire safety codes because the ship never leaves Norwegian waters.
Knego's 126 photos are nicely done, and his reasons for ranking each ship are thoughtful. His nod for No. 1 goes to the Sea Cloud, a four-masted yacht built in 1931 for heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post that now sails as a 64-passenger vessel for Sea Cloud Cruises. You'll have to click to the very last slide to see the carved oak paneling and marble fireplace in the owner's suite.
• Canadian Aaron Saunders' "From The Deck Chair" blog is consistently well written, and Saunders is another fine photographer.
His blog is actually going on hiatus while he spends time this month on the Seabourn Sojourn as a guest lecturer, but his archive is easy to access. One entry that particularly caught my attention was his report on a 2017 cruise to the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia on a small ship line called Outer Shores Expeditions; his visit to the abandoned town of Ocean Falls is fascinating.
• A recent must-read in London's Daily Telegraph a few weeks back dealt with a British woman who fell off the Norwegian Star in the Adriatic Sea, only to be rescued by the Croatian Coast Guard after bobbing in the water for 10 hours.
But wait, it gets better: It seems that Norwegian Cruise Line president Andy Stuart phoned his mom in England to complain about the bad publicity Norwegian was getting, and Stuart's mom, in turn, phoned the Telegraph to vent about the actions of what she termed "this stupid woman."
"I spoke to Andrew at lunchtime. He phones me almost every day. What he said was 'this is fake news,'" the Telegraph quotes Mrs. Stuart as saying. Which brings me to a pair of closing insights.
The first is the wonderful competitiveness of the British press, which more often than not finds an angle that rival papers don't have. The second is that in addition to being a smart cruise executive and all around good guy, Andy Stuart must be in the running for the title of Best Son in the World.