easyCruise

easyCruise is a kind of cruising hostel. It makes Greek island hopping cheap and fun, with more time spent on land than on the boat

The folks—OK, one folk, a Greek-born entrepreneur named Stelios—behind discount airline easyJet are entering the cruise market in summer 2005 with an old Renaissance Cruises ship they have refurbished and rechristened as the easyCruiseOne (www.easycruise.com).

In winter, It has been cruising the Caribbean, and since summer 2007 easyCruise dropped its old Italian/French Riviera run in favor of heading to the Aegean and cruising between a number of Greek islands—some of them moderately famous, several virtually unknown (and therefore little spoiled by mass tourism). It was so successful, they bought a second boat to introduce to the Aegean market in 2008, visiting a combo of Greek Island and the Turkish coast.

With so few cruise itineraries, why would I single out this company? EasyCruise differs from a regular cruise in four main ways, detailed below.

The easyCruise Difference(s)

• It's cheap. Cabins start at £70 (around $140) per person for a week-long cruise. These cabins are not spacious or sumptuous. They're modular efficiency jobs tarted up in the easy corp's eye-popping orange livery, similar to the design being used in easyHotels (though, according to Stelios, they're phasing out the orange livery in favor of something more stylish and less glaring).
• You must amuse yourself. The on-board entertainment consists mainly of a cocktail bar, restaurant, cafe, and a shop. This is not a downside; it's a function of how free you are to leave. On a standard cruise, they provide 18 kinds of entertainment to keep you from realizing you're a virtual prisoner of the ship, paying through the nose for cocktails, feeding the one-armed bandits in the on-board casino, and freed only for a few hours at a time to shop the boutiques of some cookie-cutter port. On easyCruise, you're free to abandon ship any time you'd like and find your own entertainment on a Greek Island. In fact, their sailing schedule encourages it:
• EasyCruise sails in the mornings. Unlike most cruises, which plunk you at a dinner table and start steaming off to a new destination while you eat and then sleep, easyCruise stays at anchor in port for the afternoon and all evening long so you can get out and party on island, not the ship. They don't weigh anchor until the far into the middle of the night, using the early morning hours, while you're sleeping it off, to sail to a new port. This gives you the chance to enjoy the destinations, not just the boat.