Regent Repositioning Cruises: Luxury Crossings Explained

Regent Seven Seas sits at the top of the market, and its repositioning voyages are the clearest illustration of what “all-inclusive” means when a line genuinely commits to it. Shore excursions, drinks, specialty dining, gratuities and in most cases flights are all in the fare. On a crossing, where there are few excursions to include, that changes the arithmetic in an interesting way.

How Regent handles repositioning

Regent moves its small fleet between the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, northern Europe, Asia and Australia on the same seasonal cycle as everyone else, so the crossings happen in the same spring and autumn windows. The difference is scale: these are ships carrying a few hundred passengers, not a few thousand, and a Regent crossing feels closer to a private club than to a floating resort.

Voyages are often longer than the mainstream equivalent, sometimes stitched into grand itineraries of three or four weeks that happen to include an ocean crossing in the middle.

What all-inclusive means on a sea day

On a port-heavy Regent itinerary, the included excursions are the headline benefit and they are worth real money. On a crossing there are barely any, which makes the fare look worse value on paper.

In practice the things you use on a crossing are the things Regent includes most generously: the bars, the specialty restaurants, the wine at dinner, the room service at any hour. Passengers who would spend $1,500 on drinks packages and specialty covers over two weeks on a mainstream ship find the gap smaller than the headline fares suggest. Passengers who drink little and eat in the main dining room find it larger.

The ships on a crossing

Regent’s ships are small, all-suite and all-balcony, which matters more on a crossing than on any other itinerary. A private balcony on day nine of an Atlantic crossing is a different proposition from a balcony you use twice between ports.

Small size cuts both ways at sea. These ships are less steady in a long ocean swell than the 140,000-tonne mainstream vessels, and passengers who are sensitive to motion notice it. The trade is a ship where you recognize most faces by the end of the first week and the crew learn your name by the third day.

What it costs

Regent crossings typically run several hundred dollars per person per night, which puts them five to eight times the price of a budget mainstream crossing. The comparison is not really useful: these are different products aimed at different people.

The honest comparison is against other luxury lines on the same route, where Regent’s inclusion of flights and excursions usually makes it competitive with rivals that quote lower fares and charge for both.

Who it suits

A Regent crossing suits someone who has done ocean crossings before, knows they like sea days, and wants the version with no lines, no upsell and no announcement telling them about the art auction. It is a poor choice for a first crossing, purely because it is an expensive way to discover you do not enjoy being at sea.

If the appeal is the ocean rather than the service, start with a mainstream crossing and spend the difference on the flight home.