Svalbard Cruise - recommendation on ship size?

[antarcticanewbies]

We are looking at "Circumnavigating Svalbard The Ultimate Expedition" with Hurtigruten in July 2023. Any thoughts on this cruise, will be our first Arctic adventure? My wife was asking whether there are any small boat cruises (we explored the Galapagos on a small Evoventura boat last year (Origin)) and wondered whether such a small boat would work with Svalbard and if so any recommendations?

[antarcticanewbies]

Oops, should read July 2024!

[jeff74]

We are booked for June/July 2024 on Hapag-Lloyd for a 10 day Svalbard cruise.  I'm only hazarding a guess but I think that maybe small ships wouldn't work as well up there since they need to have some ability to break the ice.  We considered Hurtigruten and Silversea but decided to roll the dice on Hapag-Lloyd despite not being able to find much at all in the way of reviews for their arctic sailings.

[Hezu]

My personal experience on cruising around Svalbard is quite limited as I have only taken a short (three nights) cruise on Hurtigruten's MS Polarstjernen, which is a fairly small ship (especially as it is rather old and thus her cabins tend to be much smaller than on more modern ships) and I think that particular cruise was not even fully booked. Fewer passangers is obviously an advantage if the cruise includes landings on smaller boats as otherwise the process of getting people on the boats and back to the ship would take longer time and there might be crowding on the beach.

And there are certainly smaller ships sailing around Svalbard, I believe the smallest ones are M/S Origo, M/S Malmö and M/S Freya. These sister ships take only something like 14 passangers and primarily they are used for photo expeditions around Svalbard. There are also other bit larger expedition ships, eg. MV Polar Pioneer, that has something like 25 cabins in total.

[antarcticanewbies]

We have decided to go for Svalbard for July 2025 and we like the look of AE, would be either the Sylvia Earle or Greg Mortimer. We like the fact that these cruises are relatively small (~132 passengers), nice ships and also the Svalbard cruise seems longer than other companies.

We looked at Silversea (~274 passengers and shorter cruise) and Hurtigruten (~318 passengers).

Has anyone experienced Aurora Expeditions and would you recommend for the Arctic?