Cruises You Probably Shouldn’t Book

An honest word from the people who, yes, sell them for a living.

We sell cruises. River cruises mostly, plus a fair few ocean sailings. So this is possibly the strangest thing you will read from a travel company today, because we are about to spend the rest of this post talking you out of some of them.

Here is the thing. We have lost count of the number of people who have called us a few weeks after booking with another agent, quietly furious, because the holiday they paid for was not the holiday they imagined.

Wrong ship. Wrong cruise line. Wrong vibe. Wrong time of year. A bargain that turned out to cost a small fortune once everything was added up. None of it was bad luck. All of it was avoidable.

So in the spirit of “keeping it real” (or whatever the kids are saying these days), here are the cruises we would gently steer you away from, and what to do instead.

1. The enormous floating resort, if what you really want is peace and quiet

There is a certain kind of cruise that is essentially a small town that floats. Six thousand passengers, a dozen restaurants, a climbing wall, a casino, queues for the lifts and a deck plan that needs an orienteering kit. For some people, that is heaven, and if it is yours, wonderful, go and have a ball.

But a lot of people book one of these cruises because it looks impressive in the brochure, not because it suits them. If your idea of a good holiday is reading on a quiet deck while the scenery drifts past, a mega ship will feel like a shopping centre that occasionally docks somewhere. You will spend the week looking for a calm corner that does not exist.

What to do instead. This is exactly why river cruising exists. A river ship carries a fraction of the passengers, glides past the kind of scenery you actually came to see, and ties up in the middle of the towns rather than an industrial port an hour away. If calm is what you are after, start there rather than with the biggest ship you can find.

2. The headline bargain, before you have done the maths

You have seen the adverts. A week’s cruise for a price that looks almost too good to be true. Quite often, that is because it is.

The fare gets you the cabin and your meals in the main dining room. What it frequently does not include is drinks, wifi, gratuities, speciality restaurants, the excursions in every port, and the flights to get you to the ship in the first place. Add all of that back in, and the irresistible bargain can quietly become more expensive than the all-in fare you scrolled past earlier because it looked dearer.

We are not saying cheap fares are a trick. We are saying the sticker price isn’t always the real price, and the only number that matters is the one you actually pay by the end.

What to do instead. Ask for the genuine all-in cost before you commit, with the extras you will realistically use written in. It’s a five-minute conversation that saves a nasty surprise.

That’s exactly why we make a point of being clear about what is and is not included both on our website and on the phone, because the last thing we want is for you to book on a tempting headline price and feel misled once the holiday is yours (and let’s be honest, we want to keep our TrustPilot score nice and healthy).

3. The wrong river for the holiday you actually want

Not all rivers are the same holiday, and booking the wrong one is one of the most common and most fixable mistakes we see.

The Danube is the great all-rounder, grand cities and big sights, Vienna and Budapest and Bratislava, the busiest and most popular for good reason. The Rhine is castles and storybook villages, beautiful, but the most famous stretches can be lively in high summer rather than serene. The Douro in northern Portugal is the slow one, terraced vineyards and port houses and long lazy afternoons, the river to choose if wine country and quiet are the point of the trip.

Book the Danube expecting sleepy vineyards, or the Douro expecting a parade of capital cities, and the cruise will be lovely and still somehow not what you pictured.

Then there are the Nile and the Mekong, and oh boy, are they different. Different from the European rivers, and gloriously different from each other. 

The Nile is a journey through five thousand years of history, drifting between Luxor and Aswan past temples and tombs under a hot desert sky, the river to choose when the ancient world is the whole point. 

The Mekong is the tropical one, threading through Vietnam and Cambodia past floating markets, emerald rice paddies and gilded Buddhist temples, humid and green and about as far from a crisp European morning as a river cruise gets. 

Two extraordinary holidays, but you would pack a very different suitcase for each, and want a very different week from each.

What to do instead. Decide what you want the days (and in some cases, the culture and climate) to feel like before you pick the river, not after. Tell us whether you are after cities, scenery, wine, adventure, or simply rest, and we will point you at the water that delivers it.

4. The cheapest cruise on a website with nobody to call

The internet has made it gloriously easy to book a cruise at midnight in your pyjamas from a site you have never used before, for a few pounds less than anywhere else. Right up until something goes wrong.

A medical issue before departure, a cancelled sailing, a question the website’s help page does not answer, and you discover there is no actual person on the other end. No financial protection if the operator folds. Nobody who knows your booking by name. That saving feels a lot smaller at that point.

What to do instead. Book somewhere with proper protection and a real team you can phone. You may have noticed we plug our phone number all over the website, some might say a bit too much… That’s because we’re not faceless; we prefer chatting to our clients on the phone, and we rather like it that way.

Rachel, Carley and Rebecca handle these trips personally, and there is a number that reaches an actual human on 0204 527 9412.

5. The itinerary that never lets you sit down

Some cruises are built for collectors. A new port every single day, an excursion every morning, a coach waiting at eight, ten countries in a fortnight. If you are the sort who wants to see everything and will rest when you get home, brilliant, these exist for you.

For some people, though, a packed itinerary on paper turns into a tiring holiday in practice. You come back needing a holiday. 

What to do instead. Be honest with yourself about pace. There is no prize for the most ports. A gentler itinerary with sea days or slow afternoons, and the freedom to skip an excursion and simply sit on deck with a drink, is often the better holiday.

6. The cruise where you booked your own flights to save a bit

This one is tempting and it catches good, sensible people all the time. The cruise is booked, the flights look cheaper if you grab them yourself, so you do, and you save perhaps eighty pounds.

Then the airline reschedules. Now your flight lands after the ship has sailed, the two bookings have never heard of each other, and there is no single person responsible for getting you and your holiday back together. The eighty pounds you saved is the least of it.

What to do instead. When the flights, the cruise and any hotel nights are booked as one protected package, a delay becomes our problem to solve rather than yours to panic about. 

That is what the ABTA and ATOL protection is actually for, and it is the part nobody thinks about until the morning it matters.

So…why is a cruise company telling you all this?

Fair question. The honest answer is that the cruises people regret are almost always the ones booked in a rush, alone, with nobody asking the awkward questions first. The cruises people rave about for years afterwards are the ones that were planned with an expert and genuinely suited them.

We would rather be the company that talks you out of the wrong holiday and into the right one, even when the right one is cheaper, than the company that takes the booking and lets you find out the hard way. That is more or less the whole idea behind doing this properly, with a real person who plans the lot with you, from the cruise to the flights to the hotel night at the end.

If you are weighing up a cruise and you are not sure it is the right one, this is the best possible moment to talk to us. Call the team on 0204 527 9412, tell us what you actually want from the week, and we will tell you the truth about whether it will deliver. 

Even if the truth is “don’t book it”.