by Sarah Kuta
Last updated: 1:50 PM ET, Tue February 13, 2024
Would you book a cruise if you didn’t know where you’d be sailing?
That’s exactly what Windstar Cruises is hoping guests will be willing to do next year during its new “mystery cruise,” which is scheduled to set sail aboard the Star Legend on April 19, 2025.
The eight-day voyage will depart from and return to Athens—but every other stop on the itinerary will be a mystery until the captain reveals it 24 hours ahead of arrival. Once the next location is announced, then guests will be able to choose from a variety of different shore excursions at that destination.
“It’s going to be a lot of places—the majority of them, if not all of them—we haven’t been before,” said Janet Bava, Windstar’s chief commercial officer.
The idea arose during Windstar’s current 11-day “Tahiti & the Tuamotu Islands” sailing, which departed from Papeete, French Polynesia on February 4 onboard the Star Breeze. The 312-guest vessel replaced the 148-passenger Wind Spirit in French Polynesia and will remain in this region year-round.
The vessel was supposed to take passengers to destinations in the Tuamotu Islands and the Society Islands, but Cyclone Nat disrupted those plans just two days into the itinerary.
Because the tropical storm would have made it dangerous and uncomfortable to continue on the current course, the onboard operations team quickly drew up a completely new itinerary to escape the bad weather.
Instead, Star Breeze headed northeast to the remote Marquesas Islands—where Windstar had already planned to launch new itineraries in July—for three days of exploration. Passengers were thrilled.
The positive response to this on-the-fly change got Windstar’s leadership team thinking: What if they could create an entire itinerary filled with unknown-to-guests port calls? They spent the next few days planning and, earlier this week, unveiled the mystery cruise concept to travelers onboard the Star Breeze.
“It’s sort of awakening the sense of adventure again, what travel should always do,” said Chris Prelog, Windstar’s president. “It’s something different, something really interesting. It’s a cruise for guests who like adventure, who don’t want to plan everything out.”
The mystery itinerary will double as a president’s cruise, with Prelog joining the sailing. But even Prelog won’t know where the ship is headed until 24 hours before, to help maintain the mystique.
“The team has decided collectively not to tell me either,” he said. “They know if they tell me a detail I’ll tell [guests] anyway.”
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