True Luxury Cruising
“Once people see there is an alternative to big-ship, mass-market cruising, people will become hooked on luxury vessels.”
Sadly, this quote is not from anyone within the yacht charter industry. It is from the marketing director at Silversea, an upscale cruise line that is one of several mentioned in this article posted yesterday by MSNBC. The article’s headline? “Luxury Cruising is the Next Big Thing.” The number of times private yacht charter is mentioned? Zero.
I’ll tell you, I’m no longer surprised by stories like this coming out of the mainstream press, which takes many, many advertising dollars from the cruise ship industry. Most of these reporters simply fail to look past cruise ships for cruising articles, at any price point.
I used to get angry about articles like this, but nowadays I make it my personal business to expose them for the half-baked reporting that they really are. Anyone writing a story about luxury cruising, who fails to even acknowledge yacht charter as an option, simply isn’t doing her homework. Reporters used to be able to say the information simply wasn’t out there to find. Today, thanks to CharterWave in particular, the information is readily available and accessible to anyone who cares to seek it out.
Luckily for those of us who understand that charter yachts are safer, more environmentally friendly, often in the same per-person price range as cruise ships, and, well, just plain better, readers are turning out to be smarter than reporters like this one at MSNBC. They’re moving past mainstream media features about cruise ships and coming to sites like CharterWave directly, in our case to the tune of about 50,000 readers each year (and still steadily growing).
As that MSNBC article’s headline said, luxury cruising is, indeed, the next big thing. If you’re reading this blog post, then you are one of the smarter travelers who has actually come to the right place to find it.