If you’re tired of wandering through towns consisting mainly of souvenir shops, or mad dashes past famous landmarks in a tour bus, consider a cruise that’s mainly about cruising. As you might figure, the mass cruise market is seasonal: summer peaks in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Alaska, and winter peaks in the Caribbean, Bahamas, and warm-water coastal resorts. The big cruise lines “reposition” their ships accordingly, which means one-way transatlantic trips eastbound in spring and westbound in fall.
Typical repositioning cruises last two to 10 weeks. Departure and arrival ports vary depending on planned future itineraries, but they include the most popular ship base ports on both sides of the ocean—Barcelona, Southampton, and Civitavecchia in Europe, South Florida, Galveston, and New York in the United States. For the most part, they’re designed to get a ship from where it ends one season to where it starts its next season. The focus is being at sea, but some trips make one or two port calls at the Azores, Madeira, The Canaries, Bermuda, or the Bahamas.
