The most efficient list-ticking machine ever built
Six destinations in seven days. That is the arithmetic of a week on Tui's Marella Voyager in the Mediterranean: Athens, Santorini, Crete, Kefalonia, a Turkish resort town, four Greek islands in total, with the ship doing the moving while you sleep. A 26-year-old writer for the Daily Mail took that itinerary last week and came back with the Acropolis, a guide reciting Greek mythology under the columns, and the Oia photograph. If your goal is volume, nothing else comes close.
And she is not an outlier. Of the Britons who cruised in the past year, 19 per cent were between 25 and 35 — a higher share than the over-65s, at 16 per cent. In 2019 that younger figure sat around 5 per cent. Whatever cruising used to signify, the demographic has moved.
But read the Santorini day closely and you can see exactly who is in charge. Six hundred steps up from the harbour to Fira, dodging donkeys carrying other tourists. A police officer pointing toward the bus station. A £1.90 fare to Oia through twisting lanes. Then half an hour queued for a photograph of white buildings and blue domes already seen on social media.
Every one of those choices is real, and none of them is about Santorini. They are about fitting Santorini inside a window that ends when the ship leaves. Nobody on that schedule stays for the evening light, because the evening belongs to the Broadway Showlounge. The cruise delivers precisely what it promises: the places, ticked, cheaply, with a guide. It just quietly reserves the right to decide how long each one gets.
That cohort now out-cruises the over-65s, and in 2019 it was around 5 per cent — the list-ticking holiday has changed hands.
The opposite method: build outward from one thing you actually like
Put the same questions to a trip planned the other way round. A mapping enthusiast writing on OpenStreetMap read about Vienna's Globe Museum, realised he had never been to Vienna, and decided to go — then extended the trip south-east to Bucharest, because Bucharest has a museum of old maps. He then asked other mappers what else belonged on the list.
Notice what governs this itinerary. Not a departure time, not a survey of trending destinations, but an interest he already had. "Looking at old maps is an aesthetic experience," he writes, "and it's a great way to see how politics, wars and peace have passed." Two cities, two museums, no queue.
The trade is obvious and worth stating plainly. He will see a fraction of what the cruise passenger sees, at more cost per place, with no whirlpool tubs and nothing that photographs well. What he gets instead is a list nobody else assembled for him, and enough time in each room to be bored or absorbed on his own terms.
Which list would you still recognise in ten years
The phrase has drifted far enough from experience that it now describes pure tallying. The Diplomat writes that Myanmar's Min Aung Hlaing has "itemized a bucket list of friendly countries," touring Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, China, India, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Nothing there is about seeing a place. It is about the count.
That is the failure mode worth guarding against, and the cruise does not cause it — the traveller does. A reader who wants Santorini rather than a picture of Santorini should know the ship's departure time is the real itinerary before paying for it.
Both travellers in this issue are working from a list. One is ticking off places the world already agrees are worth seeing; the other is going to Vienna because he likes old maps. Ask which list you would still call yours in a decade — and whether any item on it survives being seen in four hours.