5 days ago
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- Travel Weekly
Missed the last eclipse? Cruise lines offer a remedy in 2026
Teri West
Do you remember where you were on April 8, 2024?
It was a day where hundreds of thousands of people congregated in states like Vermont and Ohio to experience an event that lasted only about four minutes: a total solar eclipse.
If you weren't one of those who traveled for it and didn't happen to live anywhere along its path of totality, that may have been the day that you swore you'd travel to catch the next one.
Cruise lines, too, made a promise to themselves that they would be there.
And "there" is coming sooner than you think. A total solar eclipse will be visible next August in Greenland, Iceland, Spain and Russia. Seabourn Cruise Line and Virgin Voyages will be offering their first eclipse sailings next year, with plans to position ships within the path of totality that traverses the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.
Cruises filling up fast
Eclipse sailings are doing incredibly well.
Seabourn is offering two sailings, and both are pretty much sold out, said chief marketing officer Mike Fulkerson. One is a two-week voyage along Western Ireland and ending in Iceland, and the other will sail the Mediterranean roundtrip from Barcelona.
Princess Cruises recently added a third sailing to its lineup.
Eclipse cruises' popularity caught Atlas Ocean Voyages off guard when it launched sales for its 2024 sailing, but now the company knows just how much people want to be on a cruise during the event, CEO James Rodriguez told me.
"If I could make more eclipses throughout the year, I would," he said.
Cruises enable eclipse enthusiasts to develop a communal sense of excitement during the build-up toward the brief event and offer more dexterity than on land, he said.
If one location in the path of totality has cloud cover, for example, the ships can navigate to a more favorable location as the event approaches.
And since the cruises last more than just that day, the entire ship finds a sense of community as anticipation builds toward that moment, Rodriguez said.
"It's kind of hard to replicate on a land vacation versus a cruise vacation because you're all there onboard [and] experience this together," Rodriguez said. "You talk about it before, you talk about it when it's happening and then you also talk about it after the cruise, and you create friends. And so for us, it's the closest expedition experience, that communal experience, that you have outside the polar regions."
He's found there to be a contingency of eclipse chasers who seek out cruises on those specific dates. The company sold out half of its 2024 sailings in half a day.
One of its 2026 sailings will travel through Iceland and Greenland, and the other will be in the Mediterranean.
Seabourn published a graphic of an eclipse before launching sales for its 2026 voyages and saw a rush of inquiries, said Fulkerson.
"Our travel agents and our internal sales team were just getting bombarded with, 'When is it going to be available?'" he recalled. "'Can I get on a wait list?'"
During the early sales launch period, the company saw a 400% increase in bookings compared to similar timeframes for noneclipse cruises, he said.
Preparing for 2027
The sweet spot for launching eclipse sailings is slightly more than two years out, Rodriguez told me, which is why you're starting to see sailing become available for 2027's eclipse. The path of totality in 2027 spans from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean with land coverage in parts of North Africa and the Middle East.
Holland America launched sales for two 2027 eclipse cruises last week.
"The excitement around viewing a total solar eclipse the past few years has been palpable," Paul Grigsby, the line's vice president of deployment, said in a statement. "We jumped at the chance to create more itineraries."
