Posted on 02/27/2015 4:37:13 AM PST by iowamark
Viking Cruises will establish its first North American beachhead, a homeport in New Orleans, starting in 2017.
Viking Cruises will establish its first North American beachhead, a homeport in New Orleans, and will offer cruises up the Mississippi River starting in 2017, the company and Louisiana officials announced.
The move is seen as an effort to capitalize on rapidly growing interest in river cruises, which involve much smaller vessels than most ocean liners.
The company — whose boats ply the rivers of Europe, Russia, China, Southeast Asia and Egypt — will begin cruising the Mississippi with two boats in late 2017, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
The cruise line plans to expand its fleet on the river to six by 2019, it said.
Depending on the season, the cruises will go as far north as Memphis, Tennessee; St. Louis, Missouri, or St. Paul, Minnesota, the company said.
Currently, the cruise market on the United States’ biggest river is limited, Mike Driscoll, editor of the trade publication Cruise Week said in a telephone interview.
“The view is that Viking is going to create that market,” Driscoll said.
“We are excited about the prospect of bringing modern river cruising to the Mississippi,” Viking Cruises Chairman Torstein Hagen said in the statement issued by Viking and Louisiana Bobby Jindal’s office.
Each boat will carry up to 300 passengers, about a tenth of the capacity of most oceangoing cruise ships, the company said. The vessels are expected to dock near New Orleans’ historic French Quarter...
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
I thought Vikings would be raping and pillaging along the Mississippi river. Kinda disappointed to see it’s cruise lines.
How about a cruise up and down the East Coast Intracoastal Waterway!
They are needed to plunder and pillage DC so a fresh start can be made. Longevity equates with gone.
I’d like to take a great lakes cruise someday.
River cruises make more sense in Europe, where the distances are much shorter. Same with trains.
Where are the oars?
Is the “cut-across” (Indian River to Black River, I think) still open in the Northern-lower?
Been a long time since I went from L. Huron to L. Michigan.
With the loss of oil revenues Norway may have to return to the grand old days of plunder. ;^)
We are (tentatively) planning a cruise on the Rhine River through Germany, etc. in October, 2016.
IF - and ONLY IF - travel to Europe is safe at that time.
P.S. The friggin’ Mississippi River WILL kill you. No thanks!
Most of the ports on the Great Lakes look like Marquette MI does now.
You go there and look at the crumbling relics of a dead port.
The empty steel mills, or the brownfields that they once were. The empty grain and concrete elevators and all the ancillary businesses that they supported.
It’s actually depressing to see what once was, especially from Buffalo west.
If Vikings landed in modern day Stl or Memphis,they would be the ones raped,robbed and murdered! LOL!
Gonna see alot of mud.
And where the countryside and cities one passes are a bit more picturesque. There aren’t any castles or almost vertical hillside vineyards along the Mississippi, and downtown Memphis doesn’t exactly compare all that favorably with Paris or Köln.
It could still be a cruise...
...with very interesting port calls.
LOL, probably the truth.
You should follow Homer_Simpson’s thread. I don’t think the Rhine is safe yet.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3262163/posts
CC
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.