AmaWaterways is looking to further expand its sales through the trade after seeing a 20% increase in the number of agents booking its luxury river cruises, which helped to drive 50% growth in its UK revenue in 2024.
Managing Director – International Markets Jamie Loizou said he is expecting a further 25% increase in revenue this year.
To further boost trade sales, he said AmaWaterways is working on a ‘very interesting opportunity’ for agents in 2026, but he declined to reveal more.
“We are crossing Ts and dotting the Is on that, but we will certainly be looking to host a significant number of agents on ships throughout next year,” he said.
“We also run a lot of evergreen trade incentives, such as ‘sell five, sail for free’, which allows them to experience the product as a client would.”
Agents will have more AmaWaterways cruises to sell in the next few years as the line takes delivery of eight new ships in Europe, boosting its fleet to 40 ships by 2030.
Jamie said he wasn’t fazed by the increased competition from other cruise lines, including Celebrity Cruises, which is expanding into river cruising in 2027.
“I think this will be brilliant for the sector,” he said. “They will create some fantastic awareness. They will have a huge database of ocean cruisers, and certainly there will be a huge desire among that database to river cruise.”
As only 400 of the 16000 or so ships on European rivers are for leisure cruises, Jamie said there was ‘plenty of room’ for every operator.
“Demand for river cruising is really exploding, and I think we are really gearing up, we are expanding, we don’t really see that demand going away any time soon,” he added.
AmaWaterways relaunched on the Nile in 2021, and more recently expanded into Colombia, sailing on the Magdalena River. “We are really at the cutting edge of cruising in Colombia,” added Jamie. “My understanding is that there hasn’t been river cruising on the Magdalena since the 1960s.
“We are opening up a distribution to agents that maybe hadn’t booked AmaWaterways before but also hadn’t booked river cruises before. With a destination like Colombia, river cruising wasn’t on the horizon before we went in.”
