Luxury Cruises: A Short Guide to the Cunard Queens

The Queen is dead, long live the Queen. Again. Things appear to have turned full circle for large luxury cruise liners. Luxury liners are back in fashion and just keep on getting bigger and more luxurious.

The luxury liner market slumped in the 1960’s when the world turned to the glamour new form of travel: aeroplanes. That was widely expected to be the end of the ocean liner. When Cunard’s Queen Mary was retired from the trans-Atlantic run in the late 1960’s it was sold to the city of Long Beach £1,230,000, where today it serves as a museum, hotel and conference centre.

The Queen Mary was replaced by the Queen Elizabeth 2, which was built partly with British government money, to subsidise the still strategic trans-Atlantic service. The Queen Elizabeth 2 was requisitioned for the Falkland war just as the older Queen Mary had been for World War 2. After many refits the QE2 was retired this year and replaced by the latest of the Cunard’s fleet: the Queen Victoria which joined the fleet in 2007.

The QE2 is not off to the wreckers though: like the Queen Mary it too will have a second life as a luxury hotel – this time in Dubai. Dubai World, has paid US$100 million for the iconic liner The Queen Elizabeth 2 will be refurbished and adapted for her new home. From 2009, the ship will be berthed at an especially constructed pier to create a “luxury floating hotel, retail and entertainment destination” at The Palm Jumeirah, the world’s largest man-made island. So a real ship will become a hotel berthed to an artificial island!

The QE2 and the Queen Victoria crossed paths in Sydney earlier this year, both on round-the-world voyages. The difference in the look of the two liners two is startling: in fact the Queen Victoria looks quite top-heavy with a very square superstructure. The reason for this is obvious when you discover that over two-thirds of the Victoria’s staterooms have private balconies. More balconies need more floors basically. No one wants a cabin below or near the water line anymore. The cabins are getting bigger too: the most luxurious on the Queen Victoria is the confusingly-named Queen’s Grill, which has 2,131 square feet of real estate featuring marble bathrooms and whirlpool baths, plus of course an expansive balcony.

Still another Queen is coming to the Cunard line though. Construction of the new Queen is well under way: at the same Italian shipyard which build the Queen Victoria; the new ship is scheduled to enter service in late 2010. The name of the new ship? The Queen Elizabeth: odd and slightly confusing as the Queen Elizabeth with therefore be a newer ship than the Queen Elizabeth 2, but then maybe Queen Camilla just didn’t have the same ring to it?

So by 2010 you will be able to stay at the Queen Mary (Los Angeles), sale with the Queen Mary, change boats to the Queen Elizabeth and stop-over at the Queen Elizabeth 2 (Dubai) before heading home on the Queen Victoria – confused, I am. Whichever Queen you end up at though, on land or sea, you can be assured of a first class luxury experience!

Photo Credits: QE2 Sydney Queen Victoria