Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Travel Desk Tuesday, of course.

Today's victim from the excellent travel team at the Independent is Mark Schofman, our cruise editor.

Hello.

Today I have grabbed you because I want to find out more about river cruising.

I'm not even sure it's a sub-branch of actual cruising because that seems to involve big ships roaming around the seas and the oceans of the world.

Yes, so when you often read about cruises in the national press, there's a lot of focus on

these big mega ships that are launching.

But a growing trend, and if you speak to travel agents, I'll say this is a big growth area,

is river cruises, where you're on smaller ships and you're sailing into and on rivers in

well-known cities, and you can be on a Danube or a Rhine,

giving access to places like France and Switzerland and Germany, and areas that kind of bigger ships

can't reach.

The idea is that you have, I imagine, a very different experience because I've been on a few

cruises and you spend quite a lot of time out of sight of land, I imagine on a river cruise, you spend no time out of sight of land unless it's dark. It's very different. You're sailing along the banks of some major cities. To me, it's like being in a floating boutique hotel. You walk straight on, you check in, there's no major queues. You'll struggle to find a queue at the bar, very easy to get a drink.

They're smaller, obviously, maybe only three or four decks high compared to the 17 or 18

or even 20 deck megaships you may find, which obviously means fewer passengers, maybe

100 or 200 or so.

Often it means you'll kind of make friends.

It's much more jovial and, yeah, kind of good spirit.

I imagine if you've got smaller ships, then, well, economies of scale don't apply,

and this is probably more expensive than the typical, least entry-level cruise.

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