Six days of open sea, and somebody else makes the bed.
Day eight. A deckchair on the top deck.
Nothing on the horizon in any direction. Not a ship, not a gull, not a cloud with any ambition. A book lies face down on your chest, a hundred pages further along than it has managed in three years at home.
This morning a programme was slipped under your cabin door. A talk on the Azores at ten. Line dancing at eleven. Towel folding at two.
You have been to none of it.
Last night the clocks went back an hour. It’s the fifth time this week that a captain you have never met has handed you an extra hour of sleep, and asked for nothing in return.
The ship isn’t going for your sake. It’s moving from its summer in the Mediterranean to its winter in the Caribbean, and would rather not cross empty. So twice a year, for a fortnight, the cabins go cheap.
I’ve seen this from the other side. Years ago, I worked on cruise ships up the coast of Norway, out to the Faroes and Iceland. Not as a passenger. As crew.
What stayed with me wasn’t the work. It was how quickly a ship became a village — a week in, everyone knew where you liked to sit — and the freedom of living and travelling at the same time, with the coast sliding past while the kettle boiled.
A repositioning cruise is that feeling, stretched across an ocean. Only this time, somebody else does the work.
A cruise ship moving house.
Ships follow the sun. Summer in Europe or Alaska, winter in the Caribbean, Asia or Australia. Twice a year they have to get from one season to the next, and the journey between is sold as a cruise in its own right: one way, long, with more sea than ports.
Nobody books a cruise for the sea days, the lines assume. That is exactly why the sea days are cheap.
This letter is about the Atlantic, where the migration is biggest. The Pacific, Alaska and the long way round to Australia will get letters of their own.
In autumn, west. From late September to November the ships leave Europe — Barcelona, Rome, Southampton, Lisbon, Hamburg, Amsterdam — for Florida, the Caribbean and sometimes South America.
In spring, east. From March to May they come back the other way, from Florida and the Caribbean to the Mediterranean and northern Europe.
Most crossings take twelve to sixteen nights. A few ports at each end, often Madeira, the Canaries or the Azores in the middle, Bermuda or the Bahamas near the American side, and between them five to eight days with no land at all.
Sea days. This is the product, not the gap between the products. Days with no alarm, no shore excursion and no decision bigger than which side of the ship to sit on.
Twenty-five-hour days. Sailing west, the clocks go back an hour on most nights. You arrive in Florida having been given a spare day in instalments.
A whole ship with time on its hands. The theatre, the library, the pool, the lectures the lines lay on for exactly these crossings — astronomy, history, the ports ahead. Crossings fill up with people who have time rather than a week off, and the atmosphere is noticeably slower for it. People learn your name by day four.
Islands in the middle of the ocean. Ponta Delgada in the Azores, Funchal in Madeira. Places you’d never fly to for a day, arriving the way people have always arrived there: by sea, in the morning, with the hills coming up out of the water.
A one-way ticket, with a continent at the end. This is the part people miss. You don’t have to turn round. Step off in Fort Lauderdale in November and stay for the winter. A house sit in Florida or a swapped flat, a few months of sunshine, and the spring crossing home in April — two cruises, and the whole winter in between.
Fares are per person, two sharing a cabin, and they move with demand. These are the spans we’ve found for transatlantic crossings.
An inside cabin for about two weeks lands anywhere from under $500 to around $1,400 a person. A balcony runs from about $750 to $1,600. Counted by the night, that’s roughly $30 to $100 for a bed, all your meals, the entertainment, and an ocean.
On top of the fare come the service charges most lines add automatically, around $16 to $20 a person per day on the big lines. Then whatever you choose: drinks, wifi, excursions in port.
For scale: the cheapest cabins on a two-week crossing can cost less than a one-way flight over the same ocean. The flight is over in an afternoon. The ship takes fourteen days, and feeds you three times a day for all of them.
Search by the season, not the ship. Look for "transatlantic" or "repositioning" in the lists and sort by date. Spring and autumn, every year, like migrating birds.
Book early for the cabin, or late for the price. The best cabins go a year ahead. The lowest fares often turn up in the last few months, when a line would rather sell a cabin cheap than sail it empty. If your dates are loose, late works.
Pick a cabin low and in the middle of the ship. That’s where the Atlantic is felt least. An inside cabin is darker and much cheaper; you’ll be on deck most of the day anyway.
Look at the price per night, including service charges. Two crossings with the same fare can end up far apart once you notice that one of them quietly left the taxes out.
Book the ship first, the flight second. Then fly one way to the port and one way home from wherever you decide to stop.
Because on the sixth day you stop checking your phone for signal. There isn’t any, and you’ve noticed you don’t mind.
There is almost nowhere left where you can be this far from everything and still be looked after. No news, no traffic, no errands. The sea is a different colour every hour, and one evening someone at dinner says "look" and there are dolphins, and a whole restaurant stands up.
A flight treats an ocean as something to get over with. The ship gives you the whole width of it: the size of it, the light on it, and two weeks with nothing to do but be there.
Then one morning there’s a coastline. You didn’t fly to it. You arrived.
None of this is a reason not to go. It’s the list we’d want handed to us.
Open one of the lists above, filter for transatlantic, and look at what’s sailing over the next spring and autumn.
Then pick the one with the most sea days. That’s the one you want.
If you book one of these, or try one, or talk yourself out of one — we would like to hear about it. Drop us a line.
— Birgitta & Anders
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One new way to travel. Every Thursday.
Not deals or destinations — methods. House sitting, night trains, repositioning cruises, and what each one really costs.
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