Cruising is no longer all about the sea, as this curious trend shows

Land programs take place immediately before or after a cruise and are distinct from pre- or post-cruise hotels in that they include an organised-tour element, such as local excursions and meals.

Norwegian Cruise Line, for example, has an option to extend seven-day Alaska cruises with a two-night stay in Seattle, while on some of its Mediterranean cruises you can tack on three nights in Barcelona.

Uniworld has rail partners, so not even landlocked destinations are off-limits.

There are benefits to extending your cruise onto land. You have more time to explore arrival or departure ports, and everything is organised, including transfers from ship to hotel. There may be privileged access to museums, or activities such as cooking classes.

The popularity of cruise-tours is booming. Before 2023, Norwegian offered cruise-tours only in Alaska and Hawaii; now it has 22, in destinations from Cape Town to Tokyo. The company’s overall cruise-tour capacity has increased by 1000 per cent since 2019.

Norwegian isn’t alone. Viking has six new three-night extensions for the 2024-25 season in Barcelona, Istanbul, London, Rome, Stockholm and Venice. Lines such as Oceania, Seabourn and Silversea, meanwhile, even offer mid-journey overnights, with passengers re-joining the ship at the next port.

Even more interesting is that add-ons can take you to startling places not connected to the sea at all, such as the Taj Mahal, the Borneo jungle for orangutan encounters, or Iguazu Falls on the Argentine-Brazilian border, 750 kilometres from the nearest coastline.

Some overnights, like Seabourn’s, will even see passengers rejoining the cruise at the next port.

This year Viking is rolling out a fully guided, five-night Spirit of Mongolia extension either pre- or post-cruise on its China itineraries. It includes visits to capital Ulaanbaatar and a stay at an eco-lodge at the Altai Mountain foothills in the Gobi Desert. Viking has two other China extensions to inland destinations Guilin and Suzhou.

Azamara has a wide selection of land programs, which include city stays, train journeys, and tours of up to six days. Among them is one to Victoria Falls and Chobe National Park in Zimbabwe and Botswana, another to Bolivia’s salt flats and Atacama Desert in Chile.

You can even get into the outback in Australia. Earlier this year, Coral Expeditions announced a partnership with Journey Beyond, which operates luxury Australian trains such as the Ghan and Indian Pacific for those who want to combine blue waves with red earth.

Our home-grown companies APT and Scenic, which started as land-tour providers, are in a great position to offer cruise-land combinations. Among examples are a Scenic expedition cruise to Greenland that combines with a land tour in Iceland, and APT extensions on Alaska cruises that travel inland as far as Fairbanks.

River cruise lines are getting in on the act as well. Uniworld has Cruise & Rail itineraries in partnership with Golden Eagle Luxury Trains, in conjunction with Venice cruises, that whisk passengers through Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, or from Venice to Istanbul. Landlocked destinations are no longer beyond the reach of cruising.