Would Visit Greenland Again in a Heartbeat - NOT with Hurtigruten
by DSCCIG
Greenland is one of those edge-of-the-world places that rank high on bucket lists. Unlike Antarctica, which has become overrun with "small ships" disgorging thousands of tourists during their summer season, Greenland still retains its air of remoteness, and a primary reason for that is that very few expedition ships sail to more than one (or two) places in Greenland. Hurtigruten, along with Silversea and Seabourn (the latter luxury liners only make one or two stops in Greenland), are the only ships that come to mind as running a Greenland itinerary. Unfortunately, Hurtigruten Expeditions leaves a lot to be desired particularly in terms of strategic planning of the itinerary. Given Hurtigruten's history and specialty as an Arctic ship line, we found it very surprising and disappointing that alternate plans had not been made in the event that weather - such as ice, something absolutely to be expected in this itinerary - would prevent us from making scheduled stops. This resulted in us spending almost 6 days at sea, when the original itinerary called for only 4 days at sea, in the crossing from and back to Reykjavik. For a 16 day cruise, that is a considerable number of days at sea, and, more importantly, the missing out of at least 2 scheduled stops because head office and/or the expedition team along with the Captain, failed to properly make alternate arrangements for replacement stops long before the sailing even took place. As an example, we were on the second of four scheduled sailings to Greenland. The first sailing (which departed 16 days prior to our scheduled departure) also failed to stop at the first 2 scheduled ports, and the last 2, because of ice. The second sailing, which we were aboard, same story. One of the expedition team members, whom I befriended, also informed me that for the third sailing, those 4 scheduled ports were once again skipped. I don't know about the final sailing but I sure hope that head office, the Captain and the expedition team by now have figured out how to have a Plan B, and a Plan C in place for passengers who paid a fair amount of money to experience Greenland, and not just the Crossing of the Denmark Strait.
