Swan Hellenic

In the 1950s, a British travel agent called Swan's Tours, operated by a father and son (W.F. Swan and R.K. Swan), was asked to organise a tour for visitors interested in the antiquities of Greece. The archaeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, was employed as guest lecturer.

From this developed a full programme of cruises, in which well known academics, writers and clergymen were regularly featured as guest lecturers, both on board ship and on site. The company prided itself on never repeating, exactly, any itinerary, but it concentrated, as the name suggests, on classical sites in the Aegean sea, around the coasts and islands of modern Greece and Turkey. It also, however, visited classical and other ancient sites in north Africa (including Egypt) and the eastern Mediterranean.

Unlike most commercial cruises, in which the onboard entertainment is as important as the destinations visited, Swan Hellenic cruises landed almost every day in order to visit historic sites, and travel between sites was undertaken by the ship overnight. The operation was characterised by an English ethos of high culture, although it had an international following.

Swan Hellenic was acquired from the Swan family by P&O in 1983. More recently, it became a subsidiary of the world's largest cruise operator, the British-American Carnival Corporation & plc. Under Carnival, the characteristically small 300-passenger ship Minerva was replaced in 2003 by the 600-passenger Minerva II. This led to criticism that the intimacy of the original cruise concept had been compromised.

In April 2007, Carnival ended its operation of Swan Hellenic, and transferred Minerva II to the Princess fleet, with the new name Royal Princess. This was reported at the time as the end of Swan Hellenic. Its demise was apparently compounded when Martin Randall Travel launched a series of cruises to fill the niche Swan Hellenic had left. [2]

However, on 15 March 2007, Lord Sterling, the former chairman of P&O, announced that he was buying the Swan Hellenic brand and intended to relaunch the cruise line as soon as a suitable vessel could be located.[3] Swan Hellenic was subsequently acquired by the All Leisure Holidays Group Plc, who also own Voyages of Discovery who ran the ship Explorer II (previously Minerva).

Grant Thornton's Eddie Williams, administrator to All leisure Holidays Group, told the BBC in January 2017: "The cruise operations [Swan Hellenic and Voyages of Discovery] have been significantly loss-making over a number of years and the ongoing cost of funding these operations by the tour operations has created significant cash issues for the entire group, which has ultimately led to the administration of all businesses."[1]

In 2017 it was reported that the G Adventures company had purchased the name and brand, with a view to re-launching Swan Hellenic with the first cruises planned for 2018.[4]