Virgin Voyages

Glow up #valiantlady #dock&roll

Go to Alaska. It changes everything.

Is this a missed opportunity? We love naming stuff. Let us know if you agree with Reddit, Inc.post from u/Insecurity-Guard Simple Yes or No.

Guest Editor this week : Nirmal Saverimuttu, CEO, Virgin Voyages I can still picture the whiteboard. In 2014, when we were first trying to shape what Virgin Voyages could become, Alaska was written off to the side. Not as a plan, but as something we hoped we might one day be ready for. On May 21, Brilliant Lady sails her maiden round-trip. It has taken eleven years to get from one to the other. I shared a longer reflection on the Virgin Voyages page, but what stays with me most is the people behind it. Our Crew, who have built this season with an incredible amount of care. Our Sailors, who took a chance on us early and kept coming back. And our First Mates, who have helped turn a new brand into something people trust. There is a lot of gratitude in this moment. We are ready and can’t wait to sea you there.

I am shook. WOWOWOWOWOW. The North never looked so good.

For those who are interested, Brilliant Lady is sailing through the Inside Passage today after departing Vancouver yesterday. This is our first time, and we are soooooooooooooo excited. IT IS EVERYTHING. Some ship pics below so you can see how gorgeous our lady is up there #wildthings #kidfree Join us in Alaska starting May 21.

A weekly guest editor for our Alaska season - Michelle Bentubo, our Chief Operating Officer. Michelle has been running ships for most of her career and has been quietly building this season for the better part of two years. She opens with a story about a sled dog team on a glacier and a musher who lets her in on something the brochures keep secret. She closes with her view on what it actually takes to put an award-winning kid free ship in front of one of the last true wildernesses on the planet, and then have the good sense to step back. We've 'pimped your ride' for the 'Alaska & Chill'. Twenty new Happenings were built for the place. Alaska Native Voices Cultural Heritage Guides leading workshops in Tlingit storytelling, regalia, drum and song. A resident Naturalist livestreaming the Endicott Arm transit straight to your cabin. Heavy blankets on every bed. A Hot Toddy on Deck 15 made with Fire Dog Whiskey. Round-trips from Seattle, with good routing calls that let us dock longer at ports that deserve it. Brilliant Lady. Seattle homeport. Season starts today as we sail from Vancouver to Seattle. MerMaiden sails May 21. Read the full piece below.

Recreate 'Shake For Champagne" and the Virgin Voyages vibes at home with the ultimate celebration hack. Hide the bubbly, set the scene, and make the moment magically happen for your crew right on cue. A little more analog, but it does the job.

Our brand is not our ads. It's your memories. Rolling Stone just spent time aboard Brilliant Lady. They didn't do a review of a cruise. Theydid a story about music, memory, and what happens when you stop treating guests as a number. Some moments we loved reading: 🎸 Nile Rodgers and CHIC turned the ship into one giant sing-along across the generations. 🎶 25+ music zones curated end-to-end. From galleys, elevators, lounges to outside decks. Sound is wayfinding. Sound is feeling. Sound is vibes. 🎤 Jeremy Larochelle, our Head of Music, putting it plainly: "We're not trying to pigeonhole (sailors)". No funk night. No country in the corner on Tuesdays. Just great musicians from all genres, full stop. They carry the same disruptive, inclusive DNA that made Virgin Voyages what it is. 🗣️ Nathan Rosenberg, our Chief Marketing, Brand Experience & Momentum Officer, naming the why: "The brand is not the ads or the marketing, it's the memory. It doesn't matter what we've done — if we haven't created a memory for you that you want to actually remember, you'll never come back." Music is one of the fastest ways into that memory. 🎭 "Red Hot" paying tribute to 50 years of artists who shaped culture — Bowie, Spice Girls, Stones, Pistols. The writer admitted she'd never been on a cruise and assumed it wasn't for her. That's the point. We're not in the cruise business. We're in the memory business. We are joy multipiers. We are driven to make you smile. When the world feels heavy, you put people in a room, play a song they love, and something shifts. That's our moat on our boat (yes we know it's a ship). Read the full piece in Rolling Stone. https://lnkd.in/euAATXUY

Today, we want to celebrate the most underestimated people in travel. Not the designers who dream up the ships. Not the executives who green-light the budgets. Not the CMOs who write the LinkedIn posts. The Travel Advisors. The people who are on a call or sit across from someone describing their lives. A life that has grown too heavy, too loud, too tiring, too demanding...too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right ones. And instead of selling them a holiday, they empathetically help them find their way back to themselves. Not focusing on a transaction, but rather a transformation. The world is a lot right now. Everyone feels it. And for travel, that means the stakes of what we do have never been higher. People are not booking vacations. They are booking permission. Permission to exhale. To be unavailable. To remember who they are when the algorithm isn't watching, and the news alerts go quiet. The person connecting that need and that moment, the one who understands it before the client has the language for it, is the travel advisor. At Virgin Voyages, we call ours FirstMates. Not agents. Not partners. Not a channel. First Mate. Because that is what they are. The ones who hold the compass before the voyage begins. The ones who know that what their sailors need isn't just a great itinerary. It's recovery and rebuilding, and recasting Yesterday was National Travel Advisor Day. But a day is here and gone. But the legacy of the vocation to create human-centered vacations that are joy multipliers is enduring. The world needs what you do more than it knows how to say. Thank you for being the light before the water. Thank you for being the ones who see the world as it should be, not as it sometimes is. Thank you for opening people's hearts and minds by making sure they get out there and do things. You "Make Ship Happen". You are the reason we are smiling today. #FirstMates #TravelAdvisorDay #VirginVoyages #PeopleWhoMatter