AmaLucia

AmaLucia was delivered in 2021, the twenty-sixth ship in the AmaWaterways fleet and the twentieth in Europe, from the Vahali yard at Zasavica in Serbia that has built most of the company’s river boats. Her christening did not happen until July 31, 2022, at Rüdesheim on the Rhine, and the delay is the detail worth keeping: her godparents are two children, Riley and Will Farmer, and the ceremony waited until they were old enough to be vaccinated. She is a pandemic ship, a 443-foot hull that entered a market that had stopped.

Five years on she is one of the busier boats in this database, and the shape of her schedule is unusual enough to be worth reading carefully before booking.

The hull everyone else has

Seventy-eight staterooms, 156 guests at double occupancy, fifty-one crew, four decks named Sun, Violin, Cello and Piano. Ten stateroom categories: suites at 350 square feet, forty-five twin-balcony rooms between 210 and 235, eighteen with a French balcony only, and eleven riverview cabins at 155 square feet whose high windows do not open. The twin balcony, French balcony and separate step-out veranda in one room, is the reason most people book this line, and on this ship it is the majority configuration rather than an upgrade.

Two dining rooms, the Main Restaurant and The Chef’s Table. A heated pool with a swim-up bar and a walking track on the Sun Deck, a fitness room, a salon, massage service, complimentary bicycles, wellness classes. The elevator reaches the three lower decks and not the Sun Deck. None of this distinguishes her from AmaLea, AmaViola or AmaSiena, and it is not meant to; the class stopped changing years ago and this is a well-sorted example of it.

Where she actually sails

Two-thirds Rhine, and one-third a voyage that leaves the Rhine entirely.

The Rhine half is straightforward and it is what most buyers want. Sixteen departures run Amsterdam to Basel in seven nights as Captivating Rhine, seven more run Basel to Amsterdam, and the ports repeat accordingly: Amsterdam ninety-one calls, Breisach, Basel, Strasbourg and Ludwigshafen thirty-five each, Rüdesheim thirty-one, then Monheim, Düsseldorf and Mainz on the way down. Nine more departures are April round trips from Amsterdam (Tulip Time, with Smithsonian Journeys lecturers aboard) which is where Rotterdam, Bruinisse, Utrecht, Antwerp and Ghent come from. Three winter sailings are tagged as city escapes and festive weeks on the same Rhine ground, and one is a loyalty departure.

Then there is Bordeaux, her second-most-visited port at forty-eight calls.

Twelve of her forty-four departures, better than a quarter of her calendar, are the twenty-one-night Grand France & Rhine Medley, listed as Basel to Bordeaux. That accounts for the Seine ports in her data (Le Havre twenty-four calls, Paris, Rouen, Vernon, Les Andelys twelve apiece) and for the Gironde and Dordogne ones (Libourne twenty-four, Pauillac, Blaye and Cadillac twelve each).

No ship sails from Basel to Bordeaux. There is no navigable waterway a 443-foot river vessel could use to get from the Rhine to the Garonne, and the Bordeaux program is worked by a different, smaller boat that never leaves it. What AmaWaterways sells under the “Grand” name is a chain of two or three one-week itineraries stitched together with ship-to-ship transfers, portage and land connections, and the database files the whole three weeks against the vessel that begins it. So her port list is accurate about where you will go and misleading about which hull takes you there. If you are booking that itinerary because you want AmaLucia specifically, ask the line which ship operates each week; the Rhine leg will be hers and the rest will not.

Her season runs April through November, with almost nothing in deep winter, a single February 2028 departure against five in April 2028 and eleven across the two Novembers. April is her densest month, which follows from the tulips.

Who she suits

Someone booking the Rhine on a modern hull. The Amsterdam-to-Basel week is the most-sold itinerary in European river cruising and she runs it more than anything else, on a ship five years old with the twin balcony as standard. The Tulip Time departures are a genuinely different trip from the same boat (the Dutch delta rather than the German gorge, in the two or three weeks a year the bulbs are out), and having a Smithsonian lecturer aboard is worth more on that itinerary than on most.

She suits anyone with three weeks and a taste for the long combination, provided they go in with the ship changes understood rather than discovered at the pier.

She is wrong for anyone who wants the Danube, which she does not touch on this schedule, or a Christmas-market cruise, of which she has almost none. She is wrong for anyone who needs the elevator to reach the pool and the walking track. She is wrong for anyone hoping for a ship with a personality distinct from her sisters; pick the date and the route, because the hardware is the same on eight other boats. And she is the wrong ship to book if the twenty-one-night France itinerary is what you actually want and you assumed it was a single continuous voyage on one vessel. It is three good weeks, but it is not one cruise.