If you wanted to spend half of 2026 at sea, the World Cruise on Oceania Vista was scheduled to sail from Miami January 6th on the longest voyage of the year — 180 days.
We cruised on Vista shortly after it launched in mid-2023, and think it would be a perfectly comfortable home for lengthy voyage.
But 180 days is a real long time. We thought Oceania – which is generally regarded as a “premium” cruise line, not a “luxury” line – might be considerably less expensive than Crystal, Silversea or Regent. But to book a suite that was comparable to the those we were looking at on the other three, there was no significant cost saving at all.
However, because this cruise would bring us back to our preferred starting point in South Florida, we decided to take a hard look at it.
After sailing from Miami on January 6th, Vista planned to spend the first two months of this voyage circumnavigating South America. Having done that on Oceania a couple of years ago, tracking over the same ground once again held little attraction.
The ship then was to spend most of the next month making its way across the Pacific with a short stop in Honolulu and visit a dozen South Pacific islands. Nothing extraordinary here.
Vista then plannd to cruise up the east coast of Australia, followed by overnight stops in Bali, Singapore, Phuket and Mumbai before making it — at the start of month four — to the Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
That, for us, was the most interesting part of Vista’s itinerary, with overnights in Dubai and Luxor, followed by a Suez Canal passage.
Vista then planned to spend the better part of a month making its way across the Mediterranean, up the coast of France, through the British Isles and over to Iceland – pretty much all places we have visited before.
To finish its World Cruise, it was scheduled to come down to Halifax and sail along the U.S. East Coast on its way back to Florida.
The more we looked at this itinerary, the more we wondered why we were even thinking about it.
Unlike the other world cruises we are considering, this one would have some frigid days – both at the southern tip of Latin America in the early part of the cruise, and crossing the north Atlantic near the end.
That would mean bringing along some clothes for chilly weather, adding to the six-month packing challenge.
And the only new ports for us on this cruise that we really would like to see were the Falkland Islands in the South (where Oceania disappointed us on a previous cruise) and the Faroe Islands in the North.
While in the early spring we were still considering Vista, it was not one of our leading options.