Seabourn Venture

Seabourn Venture is not a luxury ship with a few expedition features bolted on. She was designed from the keel as an expedition vessel and then finished to Seabourn’s standard, which is the opposite order from how most of this segment was built. Her hull was fabricated by CIMAR at San Giorgio di Nogaro, outfitted by T. Mariotti in Genoa, delivered on June 28, 2022, and sent straight to Tromsø for a maiden voyage into the Arctic. She was the first expedition ship Carnival Corporation had ever ordered.

What “expedition” means on this hull

She is built to PC6 Polar Class. That is a real classification, not a marketing word: it certifies a ship to operate in medium first-year ice with old ice inclusions during summer and autumn, and it dictates hull plating, framing, propulsion power and the shape of the bow. It is the difference between a ship that can sail to the ice edge and a ship that can work in it.

Aboard she carries twenty-four Zodiacs, a set of sea kayaks, and two purpose-built landing zones cut into deck three, one on each side, so guests board the boats at water level rather than down a gangway. The expedition team is nineteen strong (scientists, naturalists, historians), and they are staff, not contractors brought aboard for a week. Deck six is given over to their work: a Discovery Center that seats every guest on the ship for lectures and briefings, an Expedition Lounge, and the Bow Lounge, a forward room with touchscreen navigational charts and windows at the level of the water.

The submersibles

She carries two of them, and this is the thing people book her for. They are custom battery-powered submarines, each taking six passengers and a pilot, seated in two clear acrylic spheres on a rotating platform, and rated to three hundred meters. Almost nothing else carrying paying guests does this.

The honest caveats matter. Twelve seats per dive against 264 guests means availability is limited and dives are weather- and ice-dependent; a submarine excursion is not something the fare guarantees you. When it goes, it goes somewhere no one has been. In October 2024 the sister ship’s submarine put six people on a First World War wreck off Chile that nobody had seen since 1914.

Where she actually sails

Two hemispheres and a long commute between them. Her northern season runs out of Reykjavík and is by some distance the bulk of her schedule, Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and the high Canadian Arctic. She was the first Seabourn ship through the Northwest Passage, in September 2023, crossing from Kangerlussuaq to Nome on the 120th anniversary of Amundsen’s transit, and Belfast and Halifax turn up as homeports on her card because the long Atlantic and Arctic voyages have to start somewhere on that side.

Then she goes south. Antarctic sailings leave from Ushuaia, and the booking shows Buenos Aires airport as the departure point because the fare includes the charter flight down; you do not sail to Ushuaia, you are flown. In January and February 2026 she went further than any Seabourn ship ever has, crossing the Antarctic Circle into George VI Sound and reaching seventy degrees south, with landings on the sea ice and a call at the restored 1946 British research station on Stonington Island.

Her voyages are long. The median is a month, and the schedule runs out past three.

Who she suits

People who want the polar regions and are not prepared to reach them on a research vessel with bunk cabins. She is all-suite, the fare is Seabourn’s usual all-inclusive one, and the food is a great deal better than expedition travel normally involves. If that combination is what you are after, there are perhaps half a dozen ships in the world doing it and two of them are hers.

She is wrong for anyone who wants a predictable itinerary. Ice and weather decide where she goes, and the printed schedule is a statement of intent. She is wrong for families, for anyone who wants entertainment beyond a lecture and a pianist, and for anyone who dislikes small boats; the Zodiac is the point of the ship, and if you will not get into one in a cold swell, most of what you have paid for stays on the davits. She is also very expensive, and the submersible is not a reason to book her on its own, because you may not get a seat.