I’ve chartered a Galapagos yacht before but in terms of a booking for two people this is probably the biggest I’ve done in expedition cruising.

The couple who booked the 2028 Antarctica sailing on Endurance with National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions are approaching retirement age and they just love to travel. They travel two or three times a year on massive trips.

In fact, within two weeks of making this Antarctica booking, the couple were off to Thailand. I actually haven’t really heard from them since I made the booking because they’ve been thinking about other trips and the holiday they went on.

Before Danielle Bates became Lindblad Expeditions’ head of UK sales in 2024, I had hardly ever booked Lindblad. It was challenging going to a US-based call centre with the different time zones, different amounts of knowledge. Plus, we didn’t have anyone to come and do specific cruising training with us.

Polar Routes works with more than 20 different operators in the expedition cruise sector and all of them have had European-based sales teams. Dani’s arrival at Lindblad changed all that.

When Dani started, she gave the Polar Routes a great training session. She really instilled confidence that Lindblad would look after the UK market and gave us faith in their product. It’s not the most luxurious expedition operator by any means but it’s one of the most expensive because of the reputation that comes with the National Geographic branding. On the expedition side of things, they offer something pretty unique.

It’s quite normal when clients want to go to Antarctica they know a little bit about the destination. When I used to work for Latin Routes, people might be like “I want to go to Latin America tell me where to go”. They haven’t done research, so you can kind of lead it from there.

With Antarctica, because everyone knows it’s going to be expensive and a big commitment, in terms of their time, they’ve generally done a bit of research. The couple said to me “we want to go somewhere in the Falklands, South Georgia and Antarctica and ideally we would do the Chilean Fords”.

'It took a week'

National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions are one of the only operators who have these long 25-day cruises that cover these destinations during the peak season in January and February. Normally, operators are just going up and down the peninsula doing 10-day sailings at that time.

It was a pretty easy sell once we realised the clients had the budget and this was the expedition they wanted to do. It probably took a week to confirm the booking on 21 January. They’ve just put down a 15% deposit so far.

The only hiccup with the cabin was they wanted a category seven room, initially. There are only three of them but they were a bit too expensive. There’s only one category six cabin on Endurance so they went for that and saved around £15,000.

The commission is all of ours. We have own individual targets and there’s obviously the company target which is the most important thing. [Polar Routes director and co-founder] Martin Johnson has been very aware of the booking throughout the whole process. 

I’m not sure if it’s the biggest booking the team has made this year but if it isn’t it’s one of the top two. I’m pretty sure it was the biggest booking of the year at the time it was made.

My tip to other agents who might not have made an expedition cruise booking before is go on as many fam trips or ship visits as you can. or failing that, speak to people who have experienced these expedition operators. 

Each operator is amazing in their own right but our job at Polar Routes is to find the right one for your clients.  We do like to have a lot of information and spend time asking the questions that are going to make a difference.  

I mean you could sell any operator to any client but finding the right one and then having that once in a lifetime trip really makes a difference.