- AmaWaterways’ first year with an Australia presence has seen the brand hit sales targets and set 2025 for even more growth, with new ships and experiences.
- Once the line only supplied ships to Australian luxury travel brand APT, how AmaWaterways is welcoming Australians in its own right.
- Last week, the line’s Australian team, headed by MD Steve Richards, celebrated its first birthday with co-owner and VP of sales, Gary Murphy.
AmaWaterways has been operating in Australia as a new river cruise brand for just a year, and has already nailed its targets. Co-owner and VP of Sales Gary Murphy has no doubt how that happened.
“Our culture. We are focused on river. AmaWaterways only does river. All of our competitors do river plus something else. By having your focus just on river, we’re always interested in exploring new ideas and new opportunities in river cruising.”
New ships, experiences and excursions
There is a lot of exploring going on. Shortly, the line will launch two ships on the Magdalena River in Columbia, opening up the Latin American country to inland waterway holidays for the first time. AmaMagdalena and AmaMelodia are intimate 60-passenger vessels being built in Columbia.
There is a second AmaMagna planned – she is the largest ship on the European waterways and aimed directly at attracting ocean cruisers who demand bigger suites and staterooms. And another ship in Vietnam.
More themed cruises and shore excursion exclusives are also on the drawing board. That’s another area where AmaWaterways is different. “A lot of people will do one shore excursion in a port. We will do up to 6 in one port,” says Murphy.
“And whether it’s hiking up to a castle or setting up a biking excursion to meet the ship in the next port or meeting with a local vintner who has a 250-year-old cellar, all of those things we could be doing in one port.”
Wine tours are a case in point, says Murphy. Guests wanted more in depth wine experiences, like bringing a vintner on board to do pairings with food from the local region.
“Vintners love talking about their wine,” says Murphy.
He said AmaWaterways has already had an Australian winemaker from the Barossa Valley who has an American business bring their own clients on board.
Popularity with Australians
On the brand’s appeal to Australians, Murphy says Australians like to travel for longer.
“I see everyone’s focused on 2-week and 3-week river cruise itineraries, most popular one being Amsterdam and Budapest. But for us, introducing all our seven-night cruises has been popular.
“Travel advisors are booking a seven-night AmaWaterways through France and then combining them with a land program that they’re putting together or even combining them with an ocean trip.
France has been a particularly popular destination for extended trips, which includes a river cruise.
So what does Murphy believe has attracted Australians?
“We operate differently than the other well-known river cruise lines in the Australian market. Our focus is on getting the people off the ship, getting them into the towns, into the small villages, and providing a wide range of shore excursions that are all included.
“We don’t sell any shore excursions on board.
“The people that say ‘We’re all included’ are often selling additional shore excursions like in the choices. We include beautiful wines and beer with all of our meals and we have an open bar an hour before dinner.”
After dinner, however, guests need to buy their drinks.
Murphy maintains that’s still an advantage: “We have a younger clientele. And quite often, the majority of our guests or half of our guests leave the ship after dinner to see what’s going on in town.
“If you’re an Is Cologne, for instance, they go off the ship after dinner and drink beer in a beer hall full of 400 Germans plus listening to music and having a great time drinking cold beer and then getting back to the ship around 11 o’clock at night.
“It’s so nice to hear the people coming back on the ship just sharing that experience of ordering a gigantic pig knuckle in a beer hall and having this beautiful chilled cold beer that’s served in this tall thin glass. The minute you finish one, another one is right there.”
Murphy is quick to point out that there is still plenty to do on the ships at night.
“We have great evening entertainment on the ships. We’ll have opera singers, we’ll have a quartet. We even have a night with an Abba group.
“We have a DJ, we have dance music. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also nice to get that cultural experience off the ship.
“It’s one of the great bonuses of river cruising: you can just get off the ship and go and see things.”
MyAmaCruise App
Murphy is also particularly proud of the MyAmaCruise app AmaWaterways uses. Not only can it send postcards to friends featuring your location, but it can also get you back to the ship on time.
“It automatically sends a postcard that will show your friends where you are, but it is also a GPS locator, so if you’re out in town late at night, you can look at the app, it’ll show you where the ship is. You can show it to a taxi driver or show you the walk home.
“If the, if the ship is moving, you’re gonna have a bit of a challenge, but it’s a really nice way to find your way home.”
New Locations
Murphy is not fazed by Royal Caribbean’s announcement that Celebrity is planning to build ten ships on Europe’s rivers. Nor does he believe the waterways are too crowded.
Some 80 per cent of European river traffic is commercial barges, he says, and there are still many undiscovered ports.
And he adds: “I think there’s a skill set that you have to learn to operate on the river. It’s a different skills shift than operating in the ocean, and so there’s a learning curve there.
“But I think it’s great that the oceans are looking at the rivers because they’re going to promote it and we will benefit as they promote to their databases the benefits of going on the river cruise.”
Murphy is much more excited about opening up Columbia. Local towns are now swinging behind the first river cruise ships.
“It wasn’t until we started building the docks that the local towns started getting really excited and saying:When you come, this is what we’re going to do for you.
“Like the little town of Baho, which is known for its jazz. They have a jazz festival, and they’re really excited to perform for people other than the local community. They’re gonna put a jazz show on every time we show up.
“Each little town that has a wonderful history, starting from the colonial period. The Spanish would bring their gold and silver up into the river to hide it from pirates and they developed these local communities and then they stopped operating paddle wheelers in 1962. No one has come by to visit them since, so here we come!”
AmaWaterways flew European engineers and welders to help develop a local skill set. The government of Colombia has also helped.
“They recognise that if we’re successful, other people will come into the market and start cruising on the Magdalena River, which we welcome.”
Murphy is hoping to link cruises on the Magdalena River to ocean cruises, and he expects agents will match cruises with visits to heritage icon Machu Picchu or the Galapagos.
Muphy reveals AmaMagna has been AmaWaterways secret weapon to convert ocean cruisers to river.
“There’s a market out there for the clients that like ocean, but they want the larger staterooms. They’re afraid of going on rivers because they think the staterooms are too small.
“So we built the AmaMagna. And we’re filling it with those types of clients, but then those clients are going on our other ships because they’ve learned that river cruising is a lot of fun.
“It’s not about the ship like when you’re in the ocean because there’s so much time and the ease of going ashore”
