Who Seabourn is for
Seabourn is for adults who would otherwise book a small luxury hotel, and who have the time to take a long voyage. The typical sailing on this site is around three weeks; the shortest is a week and the longest runs past four months. That is a vacation you arrange your year around, not one you slot into two weeks’ leave.
There is no children’s program and no attempt at one. There is no casino spectacle, no production show worth the name and nothing resembling a water park. What there is instead is a very high crew-to-guest ratio, a passenger list in the low hundreds, and the assumption that you will spend the evening at dinner and in conversation.
It is emphatically not a value proposition against a mainstream line, and anyone approaching it as one will be unhappy. It is a strong proposition against a five-star hotel with a car and a driver, which is the comparison the line is actually making.
The two fleets
The ocean ships are Seabourn Quest (2011, 458 guests) and the larger Seabourn Encore (2016) and Seabourn Ovation (2018), each 600 guests. Every cabin on all three is a suite. Encore and Ovation are all-veranda; on Quest about ninety per cent of suites have one. Even the largest is a small ship by any modern standard, and the space per guest is among the highest at sea.
The expedition ships are Seabourn Venture (2022) and Seabourn Pursuit (2023), 264 guests each in ocean-front suites, with ice-strengthened hulls. Each carries a twenty-three-strong expedition team, twenty-four Zodiacs, enough to put every guest on the water at once, kayaks, e-bikes and two custom six-guest submarines. These are the ships that take the Antarctica and Arctic itineraries, and they are a materially different vacation from the ocean fleet: parkas, landings and a daily briefing rather than a sea day.
The line was founded in 1986 as Signet Cruise Lines, is owned by Carnival Corporation, sits within the Holland America Group and is run out of Seattle.
The fare arithmetic, which is the whole argument
A Seabourn fare looks roughly an order of magnitude larger than a mainstream one, and the honest comparison requires subtracting what is already inside it:
- every restaurant on board, including The Grill by Thomas Keller, with no surcharge anywhere
- an open bar for the whole voyage, wine, champagne, spirits, cocktails, beer and soft drinks
- all gratuities for onboard staff, with no daily service charge added
- Wi-Fi
- caviar on request, anywhere on the ship, and on warm-weather sailings served to swimmers from a Zodiac
- the watersports marina itself, when conditions allow
On a mainstream line, a suite plus a premium drinks package plus daily gratuities plus specialty dining plus Wi-Fi is a large number that nobody quotes up front. Subtracting it closes a real part of the gap. It does not close all of it, and pretending otherwise is how people end up disappointed. Seabourn is expensive, and the fare structure means you find that out at the point of booking rather than in instalments over the voyage.
What to know before you book
Shore excursions are not included on the ocean ships. This is the largest gap between “all-inclusive” and what people assume it means, and they are priced at Seabourn’s level. Only on the expedition ships are the daily landings and Zodiac tours part of the fare, and even there, the submarine dives are an optional extra.
The ships are small and you will feel the sea. A 264-guest expedition vessel in the Drake Passage, or a 600-guest ship on a winter Atlantic crossing, moves in a way a very large ship does not. For the polar itineraries this is not a footnote.
Ventures by Seabourn is a separate thing. On the ocean fleet it is an optional program of expedition-style excursions on selected itineraries, run by an expedition team, and it is charged for. It is not the same as booking one of the two expedition ships.
The long voyages are genuinely long. With a median sailing of about three weeks, the passenger list barely turns over and the ship becomes a small community. Most guests count that as the point. It is worth knowing before you commit to it.