At Sea with Doug Newman

Last week Cruise Critic published my sneak preview of Azamara Cruises‘ “new” Azamara Journey.

“Azamara Journey elicits mixed feelings. On the one hand, there’s no getting away from the fact that it really is a copy of Oceania’s trio. It may be a copy of something very good, but it’s still just a copy. Journey is very nice, but the tiny differences between it and its siblings-turned-competitors — Azamara boasts things like different carpet and flat-screen TV’s — simply aren’t compelling reasons to choose this over the tried-and-true Oceania ships. Perhaps in the future Azamara will come up with some way to distinguish itself, but in the meantime, Journey represents little more than an effort by a big cruise line to fend off a smaller competitor by simply mirroring whatever that competitor does.

On the other hand, copy or not, it’s still a lovely ship that, if not a change from Oceania, is at least a nice change from all the huge mass-market mega-ships out there today. It’s easy to forget that four years ago, Azamara would have been a revelation.”

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