Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Call there. It's Wednesday the 20th of May.

And if you're kind enough to be a regular listener to the podcast, you'll know that I'm a fan of

competition in travel. I'm also a fan of Norway, especially its extraordinary coast.

So I'm delighted today to be talking to Matthew Valentine. He is global head of sales for Havela

voyages. This is a relatively young company set up to go into competition with the long-standing operator of the

Norwegian coastal ferry Hurtigruten. This is a voyage. His primary purpose is puppet transport,

but with so much capacity, they sell quite a lot of it to Brits. Here's Matthew.

A Havel voyages are operating on the coast of Norway. We're not a traditional cruise operator, but operates ships where the locals can get on and off, and being Norway, they're quite friendly, and they all speak English. So that's kind of an inference. We operate all of four ships who are all the same, so it's nice and easy to travel with them and pick between them. All four ships are doing the same itinerary, so it's a 12-day

round voyage, sailing from Bergen to Kerkernet and back again. So they were stopping at 34 ports

north, 33 south. Those are the same ports, but the ports we stop at during the daytime on the voyage, is what you're stopping at night time on the voyage south. So you're not repeating the same experience north to south. It's different scenery, different excursion opportunities and so on. And some of those ports you are just stopping out for 20 minutes, but each day you've got at least one long port call. So allowing for excursions, or you explore somewhere under your own steam.

And we also have excursions where you get off the ship at one port and join it at a later port.

It's an astonishing voyage, which shows you just how remarkable the coast of Norway is,

stretching for many hundreds of miles from Bergen, all the way around to Kerkernes on the

Russian frontier and going around, well, into the Arctic. So what's the difference between,

if I may, Havela voyages and Hurtigruten, which has been doing the same thing for a little bit

longer? Well, we are obviously a newer company.

We're a Norwegian family-owned business. So we've started the owner, you know, the business has

been going for about 50 years, but he's in his 80s now and he always wanted ships to be running

on the coaster route. He saw this come true in these 80s, but he is built for brand new

plug-in hybrid ships. So they're the

most sustainable ships out there. We're in the journey towards zero carbon. So in December,

we had a biogas trial sailing, and then, but we will be now transitioning to biogas over the

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