River Cruises: Tips And Trips Along The Moselle, Nile, Chobe, Douro And More

What are special pleasures of a river cruise experience? The biggest differences between river cruising and ocean cruising? How can you convince a cruise skeptic to try river cruising? AmaWaterways co-founders Rudi Schreiner and Kristin Karst answer these questions, and tell us about some of the best river cruises in the world, on major rivers and also less-traveled ones in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

Rudi and Kristin share thoughts about  typical travelers/activities on river cruises, and authentic travel experiences among some of the world's most beautiful rivers.  We also learn of innovations in the river cruise industry. How are ships designed today? 

And Rudi and Kristin end the episode with special memories of river cruises they especially love.
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Rudi Schreiner, Co-Founder and President of luxury river cruise operator  AmaWaterways. Kristin Karst is Co-Founder and Executive Vice President.

Family-owned and operated for almost 20 years. AmaWaterways offers river cruise experiences with 26 custom-designed ships sailing Europe’s Danube, Douro, Rhine, Moselle, Main, Rhône, Saône, Seine, Garonne and Dordogne Rivers, and Dutch and Belgian Waterways; Southeast Asia’s Mekong River; Africa’s Chobe River; Egypt’s Nile River and Colombia’s Magdalena River (2024).
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Podcast host Lea Lane blogs at forbes.com, has traveled to over 100 countries, written nine books, including Places I Remember, and contributed to many guidebooks.

Contact Lea!  @lealane on Twitter; PlacesIRememberLeaLane on Insta; on  Facebook, it's Places I Remember with Lea Lane. Website: placesirememberlealane.com. 

New episodes drop every other week, on Tuesdays. Please tell folks about us, and follow, rate and review this award-winning travel podcast!
 

Transcript

Lea Lane  0:06  
Hi, I'm Lea Lane an award-winning travel writer and author of Places I Remember: Tales, Truths, Delights from 100 countries. On this podcast we share conversations with travelers about fascinating destinations and memorable experiences around the world. I've cruised on river boats around the world. I even wrote a book the world's most exciting cruises back in the 1990s. So I'm delighted to talk river cruising with two innovators in the industry on the 20th anniversary of their luxury river cruise line Amawaterways. Co-founders Rudi Schreiner and Kristin Karst will be sharing the latest innovations and trends in river cruising, a thriving travel segment. Rudi is a native of Vienna, Austria. After graduating with an MBA he spent seven months doing research on a raft on the Amazon River in Peru, his first experience with river cruising. Kristin is a native of Dresden, Germany, and has become one of the leading executives in the river cruise industry. Welcome Rudi and Kristen to Places I Remember.

Rudi Schreiner  1:15  
Great to be here. Thank you so much for having us.

Lea Lane  1:19  
Thank you. There's a strong demand for river cruising, driven in part I think by the increased desire for intimate and immersive travel. For those who may not know, please describe some of the special pleasures of a river cruise experience.

Kristin Karst  1:34  
Oh, river cruising is something very small and personal. So our ships are between say 28 guests capacity on our smallest vessels in Africa to about 150 in the average on the European rivers To 190 on our double wide ship, the Amamagna the luxury of space. So it's all about you know being introduced to the family, all the personal things that our clients want: personal excursions, catering to personal interests, all our short excursions are included. But we operate them in very small groups or we have hiking and biking and many many excursions at the same time. So the choice is yours from active to very gentle walking towards even late riser tours. And everything is included in the river cruise adventure. So from all the delicious meals on board I can truly say it is six-star cuisine to order finest local wines with lunches and dinner, the bubbly in the morning or complimentary sip and sail hour prior to dinner. And so many delights and surprises. And that is also something for us, so important that we constantly surprise our guests with things they haven't expected that they signed up for: the river cruise being so close to the banks of the river when you're cruising, seeing the castle, seeing the vineyards everyday a sea day and I say S E E day; rivers physically take you through the country, while oceans take you to countries. Now I have to say the rivers do both because even on a seven-night river cruise, let's say the Rhine River, we sail from Amsterdam to Basel and cruise to four countries, and that's the same witht the Danube when we go from Budapest to Nurenberg. We are in Hungary, in Slovakia, in Austria and of course in Germany. And then we offer beautiful pre and post land programs connected to our river cruises -- we go to Prague, go to Paris and many other beautiful spots in the world.

Rudi Schreiner  3:59  
Let me add a little thing about my thoughts on one important item on river cruising. If you are in Europe on a river cruise, and in comparison to any other means of transportation like motor coach, car or train, you actually get double the leisure time during your vacation because you don't have to check in, checkout. You arrive with your ship in town and you step off the bar and you're in downtown. So you gain a tremendous amount of leisure time. You go to bed at night and you wake up the next morning in another city. Still spend most of the time in town so from that side you have a tremendous amount of leisure time on a on a river cruise and you see the the country from the little villages which you normally don't see when you drive around Europe 

Kristin Karst  4:57  
Truly combining the best of a cruise and and land-based one.

Lea Lane  5:00  
I agree, and of course you unpack once. And that has to be said, you put your stuff away and you have a little home for the time being and you can spend your time enjoying yourself without worrying about all that motion sickness. Right? It feels great. In fact, when you sleep at night, it's a lovely kind of rocking, which isn't even noticeable, but you feel it and you sleep better. Now some people express no interest in mainstream cruising, especially on big ships. These same travelers may be interested in a river cruise but don't realize that. What are the biggest differences between river cruising and ocean cruising? And how can you convince a cruise skeptic to try river cruising?

Kristin Karst  5:38  
Well it starts when you board the ship as Rudy mentioned, a check in time is maybe 30 seconds, one minute. And there are no long lines, you just embark, our friendly crew awaits so you become part of the family. You are in your beautiful stateroom within a minute. And that is of course happening all the time when we disembark the ship. For our shore excursions there is  no big process, you can just embark and disembark, very leisurely. And you can either join our tours or you don't -- you can go out on your own. It's all completely up to you. So that for me and I know so many of our clients, no waiting times, it is a big thing.

Rudi Schreiner  6:25  
And if you miss the ship, you take a taxi to the next.

Lea Lane  6:30  
I've had problems with that; you don't have to fly to the next country if you miss your ship.

Kristin Karst  6:35  
Comes with your luggage now. Right and the airlines losing their luggage, luggage can really quickly catch up. Yeah, absolutely.

Rudi Schreiner  6:42  
So a big difference is you really do spend a lot of time in the towns. Yeah, so the ship is really a means of transportation luxury, from town to town. And then you have the scenic part of the cruises. But a focus is really on the towns.

Lea Lane  7:02  
Typical travelers on river cruises?

Rudi Schreiner  7:05  
The majority of our travelers I would say are  well educated upper middle class. They are very much interested in culture in touring ending in cruising.

Kristin Karst  7:19  
ATV also welcome many celebrations, celebrations of birthdays, wedding proposals, now we have renewing the vows, girlfriend vacations. So we offer a lot of Wine Experience cruises. So culinary and wine is the number one, everyone enjoys it. So we cater to this market. And we too also welcome families. Children are allowed from age four, I think it's really good to have them from age six. It's the quality time really, families, even grandparents, is that when children can spend together and for children, special places in the world like Europe come to life. Maybe the grandparents grew up there and then move to California. So this is very, very meaningful and makes them really wonderful travelers in the future. Then

Rudi Schreiner  8:13  
We also we do partner with Adventures by Disney; that means we are cultural family cruises. We also partner with Backroads, the bike bicycle operator. Yeah. So I mean, they come with their tracks, and our people just get off the ship, get their bikes, go on a bike ride, come back to the ship, sleep on the ship. And what's also good for them is often a partner who doesn't want to bicycle can stay on board. And then be like Christine said, we have about 75 wines cruises a year. That's a lot. I mean, pretty much all rivers in Europe are wine regions. They grow the wine right on the river on the riverbanks.

Lea Lane  8:53  
It's so beautiful. Not only is it delicious, because you're drinking the wine from the slopes. Maybe they were on the slopes a few years before you see them, and right next to you. It's just one of the nicest experiences to do that. Can you give us a few authentic travel experiences among some of the world's most beautiful rivers that maybe are a little different, that people don't think about that maybe they don't know that a river cruise could be done there.

Kristin Karst  9:18  
So we are also cruising the Mekong River. So Vietnam and Cambodia This is now slowly coming back on our ships on operation. We have 26 ships on the Mekong; we are coming back in October, the middle of October. And this is a completely different culture and scenery of course from the rivers in Europe. And another river that comes to my mind is the Nile river in Egypt. We started this our beautiful new Amadalia in September last year. So that was a very special time. And since the ship has been selling out since then, we are now building ship number two after the Amadalia, the sistership, the AMA li Liang for the Nile river in Egypt. And those are truly luxurious trips, custom built, delicious cuisine, wonderful attention by our crew and cruise manager. And it really seems our guests want to explore these parts of the world, that for so many years, cruising was just not, actually traveling to eat wasn't the focus of our guests, but it's all coming back. And they want to come on a luxurious ship. Our guests don't compromise. Everyone really saved a lot of money in this past few years. And now want to live in style again, travel in style and make the memories because nobody knows what's coming tomorrow.

Rudi Schreiner  10:53  
And since we're talking about all these exotic destinations, one of the most unique experiences for me is when you're on the Chobe River on the Zambezi Queen, and you go by little boat in Botswana as you go along. There are islands of the river. And elephants swim across to the islands. And you are with a boat next to them. And you see the trunks like snorkels coming up? See a little bit of the back and  they ride 20 feet next to you a like a herd of elephants spinning next to you.

Lea Lane  11:27  
Absolutely. And you see the hippos; do they look like they're sunburned.

Rudi Schreiner  11:32  
Yes. From them? Yep,

Lea Lane  11:35  
Yep, stay away from the hippos. I've experienced some wonderful river cruises, one in Myanmar, and another in Ukraine. I went from the river to the Black Sea. So on different cruise ships, I think many cruise ships feature this focus on exotic places, but your line seems to have both.

Kristin Karst  11:57  
Really our clients are training us to explore more rivers, once they fall in love. You know, they want to explore it all.

Lea Lane  12:05  
Absolutely word of mouth, they come back and talk about these beautiful places. And then you you respond to that. Now, tell us a little bit about innovations in the river cruise industry. Generally speaking how are ships designed today; can you go out on a balcony in your room? Do you have glass all the way where you can see from your bedroom, all the things that are passing by?

Rudi Schreiner  12:27  
Our European ships and pretty much also all of our other ships, Mekong and so on, they have balconies, also outside balconies. Yeah, so our European ships have about 80% balconies, and especially now since this whole COVID situation, everybody wants to have fresh air. Nobody wants anymore in the cabins where you cannot even open the window, no middleware deck. So what has changed a lot in the last I would say 30 years. When we started building the first ship in the early 90s. Most of the ships had fixed windows you couldn't open and so on. Today, the staterooms are much larger, much more generous. And food is very, very important. On Amamagna we have four restaurants, we are all our ships, we actually in Europe feature two restaurants, but only Magna we have four restaurants. Relevance is very important. So that we introduced a few years ago, a fitness host on every ship. We have bicycles on all of our ships, so people can either take the bikes on their own and go into town. But we also include on a weekly basis, three to four guided bicycle tours, with a guidance from the guide in the back and so on. So active travel is very important. So ownership designs, Ottawa energy efficiency, the new ships have better engines and 10-20 years ago, much more efficient. We are looking everyday into how what else can we do? Today, many ships in Europe have so called power locks. That means they plugin to the city electric once we are stopped, so there is no pollutions to generators and so on.

Lea Lane  14:20  
So they're like E ships.

Rudi Schreiner  14:23  
Yeah, I mean, it's many, many cities already require that you have a power log to to plug in in order not to run generators. Very clean. Yeah. And that's becoming bigger and bigger in Europe.

Lea Lane  14:35  
Very good to hear that. I know the itineraries are getting longer on many cruise ships. You have one that's 47 nights embarking in 2023. Where is that going?

Rudi Schreiner  14:46  
So the ship goes, it starts in Amsterdam. It goes from Amsterdam and Belgium and then up the Rhine all the way up the Rhine up the Moselle river or move to France or to Luxembourg. took them from there up to Switzerland to Basel, comes back on the Rhine and in Mainz goes into the Main river past Frankfurt. Up to Wurtzberg, crosses the Continental Divide on the Main River. Right around noon, we'll get there we'll ship reaches an altitude of about 1400 feet. And then it goes into the Danube down, the Mundaneum canal into the Danube and all the way down, and then all the way down to the Black Sea.

Lea Lane  15:30  
Fabulous, middle Europe; all of it. Fabulous part of Europe.

Kristin Karst  15:35  
And that's extended vacation. Once our guests want to fly to Europe, they want to stay there for longer. And the best is to take a couple of river cruises together. 

Lea Lane  15:46  
Absolutely. And you can add on when you come in there, add a week or two and at the end add a week or two on land so you have a wonderful, wonderful trip. Well the name of the podcast is Places I Remember so Kristen and Rudi, cofounders of AmaWaterways would you each give us a special memory of river cruising, Kristin, would you go first?

Kristin Karst  16:07  
Well, I have to say I've mentioned some basic mean on the Chobe river in in Africa, really seeing at sunset herds of elephants coming down like a stampede to the river to drink; the babies in the middle. That's just such a such a spectacular moment. But the one I remember the most and back to Africa is the offer of pre or post land program to Rwanda, to see the gorillas.

Lea Lane  16:36  
 My goodness, river cruising and gorillas.

Kristin Karst  16:40  
And I never thought that this would be my emotionally, most special moment. When it comes to the travel experiences.

Lea Lane  16:50  
I can't imagine. You can go see the gorillas and come back and have champagne. Sounds perfect.

Kristin Karst  16:56  
Absolutely. But maybe seeing the silverback when you open the branches after a couple of hours of going there. And then being so peaceful and all the little ones and the teenagers playing around. It's something so magical. It's hard to describe; it's an experience everyone should see once in their life to understand

Lea Lane  17:17  
Absolutely if they can, and I love gorillas so much. I've adopted a gorilla from the Diane Fossey fund. Her name is Besoke . I have a picture in my hall. So I love your memory. How about you Rudi?

Rudi Schreiner  17:32  
Now I do have special river cruise segments which I always do enjoy very much when I'm the only ship and there are two rivers, especially one is the Moselle River. The Moselle to me is the most beautiful cruise area in in Central Europe because it's a beautiful meandering small river with extremely steep vineyards, very large and very green. And it's so peaceful there with little villages. That's one area we're always always cruising through it and really enjoyed. And the other part which is a little bit comparible to that is the Douro River in Portugal; the Douro is very narrow, fairly deep. Sometimes you almost feel like you're whitewater rafting, and sometimes you have the rocks right next to you. Big rock formations coming up out of the water. So these are the stuff just from being on a ship and cruising, two of my very special cruises in Europe.

Lea Lane  18:36  
Sounds wonderful. I hope people listening are able to take a river cruise;I know I speak to people and some don't like to cruise but how can you not like a river cruise? It's got everything. Thank you so much. Rudi Shriener and Kristin Karst. And for travelers seeking a restful yet exciting travel experience, I do suggest a river cruise. But warning: you may just never want to get off the river. Thank you so much.

Rudi Schreiner  19:03  
Thank you very much.

Lea Lane  19:06  
My book Places I Remember: Tales, Truths, Delights from 100 countries, is available in print, Kindle, and I read the audio version. You can follow me on forbes.com where I write five travel posts a month. Please subscribe to this podcast and consider giving us a review. And I'd love to hear from you on any of my links in the episodes show notes or on my website placesIrememberLea lane.com. Until next time, make some travel memories.