As for many travelers, the idea of a cruise vacations may automatically conjure images of equatorial islands and cocktails sipped on the deck from a big oceangoing vessel. While this is a big component of cruises, there is a little-known alternative that is bound to delight you: European river travel.
You may be organizing your first cruise trip, or maybe you have spent a holiday aboard a ship every year for some time. In both cases, European river travel has a lot to offer, allowing you to discover not only the joys of cruising but also the pleasure of an unconventional visit to Europe.
Plus, with European river travel you will be able to visit many magnificent but little known places and sights, mostly inaccessible even to a standard Atlantic or Mediterranean cruise, while avoiding automotive traffic, airports, and big tourist crowds.
While many trips involving around European river travel center on the visit of urban areas, there are valid alternatives if you prefer to visit more laidback areas, or even unspoiled nature in natural parks and sparsely settled areas. You can even combine urban and rural sights.
Indeed there are plenty of options, and most of them are easily explorable from the comfort of your computer screen, where thanks to dedicated online travel agents you can select from wealth of different options, as well as packages that include tailor-made parts or wholly bespoke trips.
One of the most fantastic European river travel that you can take goes all the way from Amsterdam, in Holland, to the Black Sea, in Romania. On such a trip, you will travel on three of the continent’s mayor waterways, the Rhine, the Main and the Danube, as well as on connecting canals.
This kind of European river travel will allow you to explore the charming lowlands of the Netherlands, the forested areas between Germany and France, with the incredible backdrop of the Rhine in this area, and then to cruise through Bavaria and Austria, Hungary, and finally to the well-preserved Danube delta in Romania.
If you are already accustomed to cruises on big liners, you will be pleasantly surprised by the pace and also at the level of personal attention that the ship crew will be able to give you on European river travel. As the groups of passengers are smaller, much more will be done to make sure that you will feel individually well cared for.
The region truly has a lot to offer to the discerning traveler who likes to enjoy refined culture, entertainment, and cuisine at a pleasant pace. And in fact, maybe after such a momentous trip you may even decide to come back for more European river travel on the continent’s other rivers.
EuroRiverTravel.com is the premier resource for European river travel on the Net, with information on subjects such as how to prepare for your cruise, as well as on booking the trip, cruising through several countries, making the most out of the cruise – click the links above to find out more!

