The Best Cruises

Cruises provide comfortable, leisurely access to the Inside Passage and the Gulf of Alaska. Here are some of the best bets.

• Best Up-Close Alaska Experience: Lindblad Expeditions is an expert at soft adventure cruising, and its Alaska cruises are no exception. The Sea Bird and Sea Lion each carry only 62 passengers and offer routes where the focus is clearly on wildlife viewing and exploring the wilderness, with no less than the National Geographic Society providing the expedition leaders, whose affiliation has lifted the Lindblad ships out of the realm of the ordinary in Alaska. National Geographic has been a part of the Lindblad experience since 2005.
• Most Comfortable Small Ships: Cruise West's Spirit of Oceanus offers a higher level of comfort than the other small ships in Alaska while still giving you an intimate, casual, up-close small-ship experience. And the yachts of American Safari Cruises are clearly in the high-end luxury category, although the educational aspects lag somewhat behind those of Lindblad -- as do those of all other cruise lines in the market.
• Most Luxurious Big Ships: If you want a more casual kind of luxury, Radisson Seven Seas' Seven Seas Mariner offers just that. Meanwhile, Silversea Cruises' Silver Shadow offers pure luxury with an Italian edge, although arguably just a tad more formal (without being stuffy) than the Mariner. Among the mainstream cruise ships, Celebrity's Infinity and Millennium are the big winners, offering cutting-edge modern ships with great service, dining, and design. Also impressive are Princess's newest and biggest vessels in Alaska, the Sapphire Princess and Diamond Princess.
• Best Cruise Tours: Holland America Line and Princess are the leaders in linking cruises with land tours into the Interior, either before or after your cruise. They own their own hotels, deluxe motorcoaches, and railcars, and after many years in the business, they both really know what they're doing. Princess concentrates more on the Denali/Fairbanks and Kenai Peninsula routes, while Holland America has many itineraries that get you to the Yukon Territory, beginning in Fairbanks and ending with a 3-day cruise from Skagway to Vancouver, B.C. Royal Caribbean (which owns Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises) has also made strides as the number three Alaska player, operating its own trains and motor coaches, although it has yet to make a serious dent in the Yukon.