ASTA River Cruise Expo is bigger than ever

27.03.2024 - 15:38 / travelweekly.com / River Cruises / Emerald Cruises / Avalon Waterways

AMSTERDAM -- The ASTA River Cruise Expo returned to Europe for its third year, featuring more ships, more travel advisors and an even larger venue.

After two years of hosting the conference in Budapest, the 2024 ASTA River Cruise Expo was held in Amsterdam, where nine river cruise lines put a dozen ships on display at the Passenger Terminal Amsterdam, the same terminal where ocean cruise ships used to dock before the city in 2023 banned them from docking there.

With a larger terminal, which also has a large event space on the second level, ASTA was able to increase its attendance capacity; nearly 1,300 travel advisors attended the three-day conference.

The modern venue also introduced technology capabilities for the conference, including a large monitor that projected live streams of what multiple cameras in the event space were capturing, which ensured that advisors seated in the back of the room were still able to see the speakers on stage clearly.

AmaWaterways, Viking, Emerald Cruises, Avalon Waterways, Riverside Luxury Cruises, Amadeus River Cruises and Uniworld all returned to the conference this year, while Tauck and Riviera River Cruises joined for the first time.

Ships on display at the expo included the Amadeus Cara, AmaWaterways' AmaMora and AmaSerena, the Avalon Passion and Avalon Imagery II, Riverside Debussy, Riviera's MS Geoffrey Chaucer, Emerald Dawn, Tauck's MS Joy, Uniworld's newly chartered S.S. Victoria, and the Viking Sigrun and Viking Ve.

ASTA made several changes to the expo this year, such as adding a second trade show as well as controlling access to the general session, trade shows, lunches and dinners by scanning QR codes printed on badges that were required for the conference.

Mark Meader, ASTA's senior vice president of industry affairs and education, said the new policy was introduced, particularly for the lunches and dinners, in order to make things "fair and equal for all" in attendance. Last year, there were service issues on some vessels because more people attended dinners onboard that they weren't assigned to, so staff were sometimes overwhelmed with the amount of unexpected guests.

Sightseeing excursions, which are usually held on the last day of the conference on Saturday, also saw some changes this year. For the past two expos, ASTA handled organizing the sightseeing tours in Budapest. This year, the river cruise lines handled the excursions, with some providing tours that they would normally offer in Amsterdam and some organizing special excursions not normally available on itineraries. For example, Tauck organized a tour at the Heineken brewery for advisors staying on the Joy.