At Sea with Doug Newman

Saga has purchased the 18,591 GT, 500-berth Astoria from Club Cruise, as previously rumored. The ship, on charter to Transocean Tours until April 2009, will be renamed Quest for Adventure and become the second ship in Saga’s Spirit of Adventure brand. She’ll join the 9,570 GT, 352-berth Spirit of Adventure in offering an enrichment-focused product aimed at passengers 21 and over, unlike the company’s Saga Rose and Saga Ruby, which offer a more traditional cruise product for passengers 50 and up. Before entering service for Saga in July 2008, Quest for Adventure will undergo a major refit, which among other upgrades will reduce her capacity to 450 passengers.

Built at Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Hamburg in 1981 as Astor (not to be confused with Transocean Tours’ current, 1987-built Astor, a near-sister to the older ship) for Hamburg-based Hadag, she later briefly operated a liner service between Southampton and Cape Town for South Africa’s Safmarine in 1984 before joining then-East German Deutsche Seereederei as Arkona in 1985. Deutsche Seereederei’s cruise business, by then known as Arkona Touristik and also encompassing AIDA, was sold to P&O Princess Cruises in 1998, and she continued successfully operating for the German market until sold on in 2002 to Russia’s Sovcomflot (owners of one of Germany’s most popular cruise ships, Maxim Gorkiy, and also briefly the current Astor), who chartered her to Transocean Tours as Astoria. Sovcomflot sold her to Club Cruise in 2007, but she was put up for sale after Transocean decided not to renew its charter of the vessel in January 2008. She is the second ship recently sold by Club Cruise; the ferry Da Vinci, formerly Finnjet was sold for scrap last month and was recently beached at Alang.