Derek Banks, founder and managing director of European Waterways, wants one thing understood about the hotel barge company he started in 1977 from a lock house on the Canal du Nivernais in Burgundy: it is not a river cruise company.
“We need to be put in a separate category,” Banks told Cruise Industry News in an interview for the 2027 European River Market Report. “We are not a river cruise company. We literally have think tanks trying to find new words and branding for us, why, because we are just a class of our own, I guess.”
Unlike river cruise ships on Europe’s major waterways, hotel barges navigate historic canals where lock sizes and water depths rule out larger vessels.
The largest hotel barge company in Europe, European Waterways operates 18 barges across nine countries, from the six-passenger Nymphea in the Loire Valley to the 20-passenger La Bella Vita on the Venetian Lagoon and the River Po. The barges cruise at around 4 knots for three to four hours a day, with crew ratios approaching one for every two guests.
Prices start at around $5,490 per person per week, including all meals, wines, an open bar, excursions and transfers. The business is split roughly evenly between whole-barge charters and individual cabin bookings.
“You can’t see anything at night, so why bother?” Banks said. “Nighttime is for having a fine dining experience. We always have amazing chefs, storytellers, entertainers.”
He said the company had been offering experiential travel long before the term became popular.
“When you have lunch with a countess in her kitchen, that’s actually what ‘experiential’ means,” Banks explained. “We started using that word experiential in our marketing about 10 years ago and we’d been doing it for 50 years before that. Now everybody has latched onto it.”
While the Rhine and the Danube grow more crowded each season, Banks said the narrow canals his barges sail were effectively closed to larger ships.
“You can’t put 100 people in Burgundy in that way,” he said. “We travel on the smaller canals. You cannot put these large ships there.”
“No, I don’t feel like we really have competition,” he added. “Nobody in the space embraces more than two countries.”
The outlook for 2027 is positive, Banks said. Bookings dipped briefly when the Iran situation escalated earlier this year but have since recovered. Prices will rise around 6 to 7 percent in 2027 due to higher fuel costs, though he said demand was holding up.
The company recently launched a Brittany waterway cruise in France and extended its Burgundy program.
