Ronald Keith Neil Vermont: Barge Tours vs Big Cruise Ships
Introduction You booked the river cruise because the brochure looked perfect. Then you boarded and found three hundred other passengers doing the exact same thing. The dinner line was twenty minutes long. The best deck seats were gone by 7 am. And the "stop" in that beautiful little village lasted ninety minutes, just enough for a rushed walk and a few photos before the horn called everyone back. You did not see the village. You saw the gift shop near the dock. This is the quiet disappointment thousands of travelers feel after a large cruise, even a good one. The ship was not bad. The size of the ship simply decided how much of the destination you actually got to experience. There is a different way to see Europe's rivers and canals, and it has nothing to do with size for the sake of size. Ronald Keith Neil Vermont , founder of Champlain Tours, has spent years studying exactly this question: What does a traveler gain or lose when the ship gets smaller, and the group gets ...