If You've Hit a Wall in Your Attempt to Find a European River Cruise, Switch Booking Engines

The European river cruise is the smash success of the current travel season. If you will go to any booking engine listing river departures, you will find whole swatches of time -- especially the month of September -- totally sold out. And when you phone the river cruise brokers, or river cruise companies, they will be deaf to your pleas for an available cabin.

But the various sources of European river cruises, available to a U.S. vacationer, are curiously limited. Almost always, they confine themselves to the big river cruise fleets that operate the large modern fleets -- companies like Viking, Ama, Avalon, and Unitours. I am indebted to my daughter Pauline Frommer for pointing out on her own blog that a large number of European river cruise companies operating older or more simple ships are rarely listed in the river cruise compendiums of the major, U.S.-based search engines.

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Photo Caption: Wooden cathedral on Kishi Island in the Volga river. Joe Rubin/Frommers.com Community

And thus, if you'll go to a source like Euro River Cruises ( www.eurorivercruises.com ), you'll find a number of river cruiseships -- especially those that ply the Volga in Russia -- that are unknown to you. And when you study their characteristics and statistics, you'll discover that they are simply slightly older or slightly simpler ships, not that very much different from the slick vessels operated by Viking and its peers. They cater to a largely European clientele, an audience that insists on a high level of cuisine and on reasonable comfort. And they are generally cheaper than the big European riverboats available to Americans.

How about the daily shore excursions offered on every European river cruise? Pauline put that question to a specialist and learned that the lesser-known European riverboats make use of the very same motorcoach companies and guides as the big, American-oriented lines. In other words, that spanking new riverboat that stops for the day in Cologne, along the Rhine, makes use of the same motorcoaches and their guides that the European riverboat uses the next day when it stops in Cologne.

So here's a solution for those occasions when you're absolutely frustrated in your attempt to find an available European riverboat. Simply switch to the lesser-known booking engines (they're easily found in Google), or to Euro River Cruises, where you'll often find available cabins for the dates you want.