Nothing is as important – or as tricky – as settling on an itinerary for your World Cruise.
While there is a subset of travelers who say “the ship is the destination,” and who profess to be happy cruising wherever the vessel may take them, most travelers have places they hope to see on their World Cruise.
In planning itineraries that are different from year to year, cruise lines try to tie together a number of new “Bucket List” destinations with locations that have been popular with past cruisers, hoping they have found a mix that will appeal to repeat clients as well as first-time World Cruisers.
For those new to global traveling, most World Cruise itineraries probably look great, offering the prospect of visiting a wealth of exotic places.
But if, like us, you have been sailing all over the world for years, you presumably have already seen a number of the sites on your “Bucket List,” and have visited many of the locations found on these itineraries.
While some may well be places you would be happy to revisit and explore further, others fall into the category of “been there, done that.” And then there are some places you simply have no interest in ever seeing again.
So the challenge lies in finding an itinerary that maximizes visits to places still outstanding on your “Bucket List,” and minimizing the ports of call where you would probably not even bother going ashore.
For us, things on our still-hope-to-see “Bucket List” include the iconic stone statues of Easter Island; Bora Bora and some more of the many remote island archipelagos of the South Pacific; the Southern and Western coasts of Australia; the Indonesian island of Bali; the Cambodian temple complex of Angkor Wat; India’s iconic Taj Mahal and the pink city of Jaipur; the former Trucial States at the tip of the Arabian peninsula; the temples of Luxor and Abu Simbel; the stunning rock-cut architecture of Petra; the Suez Canal; and the Sphynx and the Pyramids in Egypt.
Places we are less interested in revisiting are most of Central America, and the West Coast of Africa.
So with all this in mind, we began evaluating the itineraries of what we thought were the leading options for our 2026 World Cruise.
| Option 1 | Crystal Serenity |
| Option 2 | Silver Dawn |
| Option 3 | Seven Seas Mariner |
| Option 4 | Vista |