It was just before Christmas 2019 when a former officer with the British Royal Navy and employee of the UK Ministry of Defense got approached by the Croatian DIV Group with an offer to run a new cruise line.

“The mission was pretty clear,” Stuart McQuaker, CEO of Tradewind Voyages, told Cruise Industry News. “To set up a UK cruise line to operate the Golden Horizon. And that’s what we’ve spent the last 10 months doing.”

The Golden Horizon is not an ordinary ship, said McQuaker.

Not only it’s the largest tall ship in the world, but it also has “large open decks base” and “fabulous sailing credentials,” which, among other things, will allow it to “go to remote parts of the world that other [ships] don’t go to.”

But another important thing, according to him, is the timing.

When the whole world was struck by the pandemic and other cruise lines had to suffer losses, Tradewind Voyages employees were quietly preparing for its launch.

“We had one week together [in early March] where we sat in a room and we worked through the philosophy, brand, and product. And then after that, we were working remotely for four or five months. We built a team that moved from five or six people up to 16 people, and those additional 10 were people we’d never met,” he said. 

“It’s been a testament to my team that [between] March [and] July in lockdown… we created a whole year’s worth of itineraries, we created the brand, we created the product, we created a website, we got a brochure ready, we got everything priced up – and that was all by working remotely.”

Tradewind Voyages is preparing for Nov. 2, when tickets for the cruise line’s dozens of offered destinations go on sale. In the meantime, the pre-registration phase showed a “fabulous response,” he said.

“I think people are very excited,” McQuaker told Cruise Industry News. “We get some visibility ourselves, but also our agents feeding back information. They’ve got lots of people who are just desperate to get in there quickly because it’s not impossible that sales will go very well … I think our expectations are high for Nov. 2.”