Originally Posted by
sfvoyage
The 2 Seabourn expedition ships (Venture & Pursuit) sail with around 200 guests for Antarctica. The logistics are very streamlined. We typically get 2 landings per day, but it could range from 0 to 3, depending on weather conditions, of course. (To be honest, 2 landings are optimal; 3 gets tiring, but luckily I've only encountered that scenario once.) Groups are colour-coded and staggered for crowd control, and landings last around 1.5 hours, but passengers can stay longer and go back to the ship with a later group if desired.
On my last holiday voyage, we had 6 full days on the Antarctica Peninsula, 3 in South Georgia, and 2 in the Falkland Islands. Demographics skew younger than on regular ocean voyages, sometimes with a few well-behaved children on holiday voyages.
The landing schedule sounds very similar to what we had with Nat Geo. I think 2 landings is probably also optimal, given the number of days you had. For us, since we just had three days, I wouldn't have minded an extra landing or cruise around. I get the logistical challenge of conducting landings though (it seems like a lot of effort for the crew... but I guess that is what we are paying for anyways).
That's really nice that guests have the flexibility to go back with a later group!
Did you enjoy South Georgia and the Falklands? Lindblad doesn't have those in the 9-day expedition, and I would be curious to see if those are worth visiting.
Originally Posted by
worldiswide
Thanks for the demographic breakdown. Much more diverse in terms of age than I would have expected so adds to my knowledge. I wonder how old you have to be to really appreciate what you are seeing and doing, but each family makes their own decisions on that. We have done safaris a couple of times, and I just compare the wait around for the couple of times of day that you can do something exciting and a lot of down time in between. seems similar... Were you satisfied with the amount of time spent outside the boat and was it what you were anticipating?
Yes, each family makes their own decisions. The kids seemed well traveled, enthusiastic, and well-behaved, especially during the numerous delays. Big kudos to the kids for weathering all of the uncertainty. I think at some point as a parent, you probably have places you want to visit as well so you just have to bring your kids with you. I'm willing to bet I would probably do the same when I'm a parent (kid-dependent of course).
Regarding downtime, I don't feel like we had that much downtime during expedition days (of course, save for the one day we couldn't conduct any landings due to the weather). Generally you get up, have breakfast, do a landing or a talk, have lunch, landing or a talk, cocktail hour / briefing, dinner, and then maybe another talk before bed.
There was generally about 45-60 minutes of turnaround time between scheduled activities, so I felt like we were quite busy. Most of the downtime was the unscheduled downtime during our flight delays and waiting for updates. If we had had our full five days onboard, I actually might've preferred a bit more scheduled downtime to grab a workout / get a massage or something, but again, we only had three days so I think most people were trying to make the most of the time onboard.
I had a friend had done the same voyage on the National Geographic Explorer a month before our expedition, and she mentioned that there was a lot of downtime, but I wonder if that's due to the larger ship size (maybe fewer landings?).