Big commercial cruiseships from Norwegian NCL and Costa Cruises
It was amazing ! Perfect to relax, take a step back and think
There's plenty of things to do, you can hang out with others, read a book, work online, look at waves all day long, go to the gym etc.
The real danger is eating too much, food at restaurants is unlimited, even at official table service you can order multiple mains, multiple desserts etc. they won't say anything
Yes those are the ones, although not all transatlantic are "repositioning cheap", it depends on the current market. You can also look at cruise comparators / cruise resellers to see all of them, and sometimes you have better prices with them.
Something to take into account is that USA residents have different cruises prices, usually cheaper, the rest of the world usually has to pay more
The easiest way to do it is on a repositioning cruise where at the end of the season the cruise lines take their ships from one market to another. The positives are a cheap cruise, the negatives are that you're right at the end and beginning of ideal seasons so your experience at each end might not be great. Also you'll have a lot more sea days and fewer port days which could be in either column.
Weather at sea can be considerably worse than coastal weather. Cruise ships are pretty stable and it's unlikely to be awful, but plenty of people do get seasick. I used to be a professional sailor and so obviously can't see what the fuss is about, but probably half the passengers I spoke to felt ill on at least one of the days, and a few people spent the entire ocean transit in bed. If you're prone to motion sickness take some medication with you.
The atmosphere is different to regular cruises. Typically less of a party and the clientele skew towards older and more independent travellers.
To answer your actual question - go to cruisemapper and seascanner and you'll find them easily enough. They're all over the world.
Yes exactly repositioning cruises ! I confirm what you're saying. Sometimes you also get people who were visiting a continent going back home. For example Brasilians going back home in December for their summer
Modern ships built in the last 10 years have stabilizers. I've been in a big cruiseship without stabilizer before and it can indeed move a lot laterally up and down (in the directions orthogonal to the direction of the ship). So, for people afraid of that just research if the ship has stabilizers
As the other said I was looking for repositioning cruises like 2 months in advance, from one continent to the other. Like I did Europe -> South America 550 euros Costa Cruise last year and Miami -> England NCL 650 euros early this year
The difficulty is finding good prices for a solo cabin. For a cabin of 2 it's even easier to find good prices for repositioning cruises
As the other said, there are more days at sea (less stopovers), and it can happen that some stopover port get cancelled (for example they cancelled my stop in the Azores because they didn't want to bother entering a big Atlantic storm, it was risky)
I'd recommend a long canoe trip in Algonquin park (or somewhere similar nearby if there is something similar nearby) if offline is your goal (though obviously not entirely similar to an ocean crossing in other ways as well).
Yeah, it is. Basically just up to your route planning... I feel like at more than 2 weeks people start going farther north but I think that has more to do with "we can" than there not still being good routes in Algonquin.
I'd probably not recommend more than a week for a first canoe trip anyways.
I did it in 2018 and it was wonderful. It wasn't incredibly expensive (about the cost of a roundtrip flight, for the one way trip). Food was great, we had the good fortune of being on a Blue Note Jazz special so the music was incredible. Not sure I ever want to do it again - felt more like one of those one-and-done lifetime experiences - but I have nothing but good things to say about it.
Also, unlike cruise ships, the QMII is a bona fide ocean liner, capable of crossing the N. Atlantic even in winter storms.
It’s a Carnival cruise. If you like going on cruises you’ll probably like it. I don’t like cruising - and we went with our four year old, and there is literally nothing for kids to do on board, (there’s a “kids club” but it was closed for the duration) and they aren’t allowed into the dining room, so we ended up living off the crappy buffet and the very limited room service menu.
Our stateroom also hadn’t been cleaned when we boarded, and they had problems with the black water system so several decks just stank of shit. Our balcony had a persistent leak above it, so we couldn’t use that either.
The tickets themselves weren’t that much, but then it’s about €1,000 for internet access, and they nickel and dime you on absolutely everything, while not allowing you to have the things you already paid for - our bill on departure was about €4,000.
Oh, and at disembarkation in Southampton they destroyed two of our suitcases, and told us to go cry harder - and then it’s a three hour wait for a taxi.
