The first of the 12-ship fleet of catamaran-style vessels will debut in the summer of 2023.
The boats will have upscale features found on American Cruise Lines' riverboats, including a swim platform with kayaks and a tender for exploration via Zodiac craft. The vessels will be able to enter shallow waterways.
The second ship in the class will be launched in fall 2023, and the line plans to build 10 more over the next several years. The vessels will be built in the U.S. and only cruise in U.S. waters.
The design of the ships makes it possible for them to visit more ports than its other vessels, according to CEO Charles Robertson. The first launch will be on the East Coast.
Robertson said that in launching the ships, American Cruise Lines is going back to its roots with a smaller boat, and that they are bringing the modern design and technology that they have learned over the past decades with them.
There are benefits of a unique catamaran style.
Robertson said there was a lot of new itinerary potential. This boat can go to hundreds of more ports than we have now. It can go further south down the waterway in Florida and go into some really cool nooks and crannies in Maine. It can hit towns that have never been on a cruise.
The catamaran style emerged from wanting to build something small enough to get into small, New England harbors with a draft shallow enough for the intercoastal waterway on the East Coast yet stable enough to run coastwise routes in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
He said that they ended up with a unique, catamaran style design. It was the only way to check those three boxes.
What will be on the ship?
The majority of the cabins have private balconies. There will be plenty of outdoor seating areas on the ship.
Robertson said it will feel like a river boat with the modern design and spaciousness of the new river boats. It can go to an island off the coast of Maine very comfortably, and it has a lot of adventure capability. We can launch kayaks from the stern. That begins to feel like an expedition.
The line said that it is creating a new domestic cruise market with the product and that there is no comparable product to this.
"It brings the best of staying close to home and staying domestic, but it adds this kind of adventure element into it," Robertson said. He said that the itineraries will not be all day expeditions. "We want to keep the products that our guests have really come to love, and so you might spend a morning kayaking off the swim platform and doing these kind of interesting expedition-style things, but by lunchtime we'll go over to Vineyard Haven on Martha's Vineyard and spend the
American Cruise Lines felt that the project was vindicated because of the strong demand for small-ship domestic cruising.
He said that people want smaller ships and want to stay domestic. There is a major opportunity for this type of ship, where it was originally just going to be a one ship or two ships, it really became clear from both a market perspective and the operating capability.
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