River, coastal or ocean: the difference that matters

Ask three people what they mean by a cruise and you will likely get three different holidays. One pictures a small vessel drifting between vineyards on a river barely wider than the ship itself. Another pictures a mid-sized liner picking its way around a rocky coastline, calling at a harbour too small for anything larger. A third pictures a floating city of a few thousand people, with its own theatre, several restaurants and a schedule of ports across an entire ocean. All three are correctly using the word, which is precisely the problem: cruise describes the fact of being on a ship far more than it describes the holiday itself.

The river cruise

A river ship rarely holds more than a couple of hundred passengers, is built low and narrow enough to pass beneath bridges and through locks, and moves at a pace that makes the passing landscape the main entertainment rather than a backdrop to it. A week on the Douro, climbing from Porto into the terraced vineyards of Portugal's port wine country, works because the river itself is the attraction: steep, narrow and dramatic in a way that would be exhausting to drive and is genuinely restful to float past. Excursions ashore tend to be short and frequent, since the ship rarely goes more than a day without reaching somewhere new.

The coastal cruise

A coastal cruise sits between the other two in almost every respect: a smaller ship than an ocean liner, generally a few hundred passengers rather than several thousand, built to reach harbours a larger vessel could not enter. A round trip through the Northern Isles, calling at Kirkwall in Orkney and Lerwick in Shetland, depends on exactly this: neither port could accommodate the largest ships in the fleet, and the appeal of the itinerary is precisely the places a bigger ship would have to sail past. Coastal itineraries also tend to favour scenery over structured entertainment, more time spent on deck watching the coast than in a theatre.

The ocean liner

At the other end of the scale sits the large ocean-going ship, built to cross open water comfortably and to entertain several thousand passengers for weeks at a time without repeating itself. A two-month voyage around the Mediterranean and beyond, calling at major ports from Southampton to Istanbul, is really two holidays layered on top of each other: the destinations ashore, and the considerable resort built into the ship itself, with enough restaurants, entertainment and deck space that a full sea day never feels short of things to do.

Choosing between them

The honest way to choose is by working backwards from what you actually want to spend your time doing. If the destination itself, close up and slow-moving, is the point, a river cruise delivers that better than anything else afloat. If you want small harbours and dramatic coastline that a large ship could never reach, look at coastal itineraries first. If what you want is the ship as much as the ports, with entertainment, choice and scale built in for the long stretches between destinations, an ocean liner is doing exactly what it was designed to do. None of the three is a lesser version of the others; they are simply answering different questions about what a holiday at sea is for.

What each one asks of you

It is worth being honest about the trade-offs too. A river ship offers the gentlest motion of the three, since inland waterways rarely produce any real swell, but its cabins tend to be the smallest, and its itineraries the least flexible if weather closes a lock. A coastal ship can feel a Channel or a stretch of open sea more than either of the others, since it is neither sheltered by a riverbank nor large enough to shrug off a swell the way an ocean liner can. An ocean liner is the most stable of the three in genuinely rough water, simply by virtue of its size, but it is also the one where a determined passenger can walk for ten minutes without seeing the sea at all, lost in a corridor of shops and bars that could, in principle, belong to a hotel anywhere.