AmaBella

AmaBella was the first of AmaWaterways’ full-length Danube ships and the first anywhere in the fleet to put two balconies in one stateroom. She entered service in 2010, built at the Vahali yard in Serbia and finished in the Netherlands, and she has spent essentially her whole career on one river.

Why she is exactly this size

Tonnage is close to meaningless on a river. What decides everything about a boat like this is that she has to fit through locks. The chambers on the Rhine, the Main, the Moselle and the Main–Danube Canal are built to a common standard of about 11.4 meters wide, and the bridges over them cap air draft. So every European river ship converges on the same dimensions: roughly 443 feet by 38 feet, four decks with the top one low and flat, a wheelhouse that folds down.

AmaBella is that shape. Four decks (Sun, Violin, Cello and Piano) with an elevator that serves only the two middle ones. Eighty staterooms, 160 guests, fifty-one crew, which works out at about one crew member for every three passengers. Nothing about those numbers distinguishes her from a dozen other boats tied up alongside; the differences on this river are all in the fit-out and the itinerary.

The practical consequence of the lock standard is that she is a long, narrow building. There is one corridor. The lounge is at the bow, the restaurant is at the stern, and you walk between them past everyone you are sailing with. This is either the appeal or the objection, depending on the person.

The twin balcony

Her one genuine contribution to the fleet. In the AA and BA categories the outside wall carries a French balcony, a floor-to-ceiling sliding door with a railing and no floor, and, alongside it, a real step-out veranda with chairs.

The reason for two is weather. A French balcony gives you the whole wall of glass open in October without standing outside in it; the step-out gives you somewhere to sit in July. On a river, where the scenery is forty feet away rather than a horizon, having the wall open matters more than it does at sea. Every AmaWaterways ship built since has carried some version of the arrangement, and it started here. The lowest category, on the Piano Deck, has neither; those are half-height windows at waterline, and they are cheap for a reason.

Three restaurants and a swim-up bar

She carries the Main Restaurant, The Chef’s Table at the stern with its open kitchen and set tasting menu, and the Café Bistro on the Sun Deck for a light lunch. That third room is the thing her 2016-built sisters do not have; they run an open Al Fresco terrace instead. The Sun Deck pool is heated and has a swim-up bar, which on a Danube ship is a small ridiculous luxury and is used constantly in August.

Where she actually sails

The Danube, and very little else. Her schedule runs out of Vilshofen in Bavaria and out of Budapest, seven nights each way through Passau, Linz, Melk, the Wachau and Vienna, with a handful of departures from Giurgiu in Romania on the lower river and one from Nuremberg by way of the Main–Danube Canal. The long option is a fourteen-night Grand Danube that strings the upper and lower halves together and ends near the Black Sea.

She does not do the Rhine, whatever the brochure copy implies about the fleet in general. The bookable inventory on this page is Danube, and it has been for years.

Who she suits

People who want the river rather than the ship: the boat is a hotel that moves at walking pace and ties up in the middle of town, and the day is spent ashore. The guided walks are included, the ports are close enough together that most mornings begin alongside a town rather than at sea, and nobody is going to make you attend anything.

She is wrong for anyone who needs space. One hundred sixty people on 443 feet is a small hotel, the public rooms are two, and if the group aboard is not your kind of group there is nowhere to go. She is wrong for families with small children; there is no children’s program and no room for one. And she is now the oldest 443-foot hull in this part of the fleet; the cabins are the same size as her sisters’ but the fit-out is fifteen years old, and it shows in the bathrooms before it shows anywhere else.