The skies are gray, there’s a soft drizzle, and the first thing we notice as we walk into Vienna’s Volksgarten park is that the rose bushes—all 3,000 of them—are covered in burlap. In warmer months, they’re a Technicolor dream that perfumes the air, but in February, they are bundled up for warmth. The rows of trees that line the walkways are also bare and pruned back, and the bubbling fountains are turned off.
“The bad news is that the trees are naked. The good news is that you can see through them!” says our guide with a laugh as he leads our umbrella-laden group through the rows of hedges to the Theseus Temple, an early-19th-century structure designed to look like a small Greek temple, which houses art exhibits and where shade seekers gather in busy months. But on this day, the temple and its surroundings were blissfully quiet.
Welcome to winter on the Danube River.
In February, I joined the first sailing of the year on AmaWaterways’ 196-passenger AmaMagna. Once available almost exclusively during the summer months, river cruises are now seeing their sailing seasons stretch from spring through fall and into the final weeks of the year with Christmas Market cruises. This year, for the first time, Viking River Cruises and AmaWaterways offered February sailings on the Danube River, testing the waters with winter departures that aren’t linked to Europe’s popular festive season (AmaWaterways’ Danube season will begin on February 8 in 2026, and Viking’s will begin on March 12 next year). Both lines attempted similar late-winter cruises on Europe’s castle-laden Rhine River last year.
The Danube River winds through beautiful cities, including Budapest, Hungary, that are blissfully devoid of tourist throngs in the quieter months.
Petr Pohudka/Shutterstock
Winter cruises are part of a trend emerging across the cruise industry to develop off-season cruises, on oceans and rivers, in response to port overcrowding during peak season and shifts in weather patterns due to global warming. French cruise line Ponant this year began offering a frosty sailing in January along Canada’s icy St. Lawrence River to show off snow-blanketed woods instead of trees decked out in fall colors. Windstar is now sailing Mediterranean itineraries in wintertime, cruising out of Barcelona, Venice, Athens, and Rome to ports that in the summer attract sun worshippers who flock to famous beach scenes such as St. Tropez and Mykonos.
Then there was my February sailing on the Danube with AmaWaterways, which provided the same shore excursions—such as bike rides and hikes—offered in June and July. This would have been unheard of a few years ago. I signed up for the winter cycling rides, in part to get a fuller sense of what is gained and what is lost in the offseason and who these trips serve well.
We’ve likely all had experiences that gave off-season travel a bad name. Decades ago, a tour operator sent me to Milford Sound in New Zealand during the Southern Hemisphere winter, when nearly all the businesses were shuttered, and snow flurries were falling. During the rest of the year, the main street pulses with activity as nature lovers flock to see the nearby glacier and set off on hikes and backpacking adventures, but when I showed up, it was lifeless, with literal padlocks on doors in town.
Budget-friendly guidebooks have long touted the frugal pleasures of saving money on airfare and hotels in the offseason, but the roped-off hiking trail I had hoped to explore that day cast a long shadow over this more intrepid and cost-conscious style of travel.
Windstar Cruises’ all-suite, 312-passenger Star Legend (pictured) is now bringing guests to Mediterranean destinations such as Nice, France, during the winter.
Courtesy of Winstar Cruises
However, as popular cruise ports have suffered from a rise in overtourism in recent years—especially post-pandemic, as the number of tourists has risen steeply due to pent-up demand—suddenly the offseason is looking much more attractive.
If you’ve ever tried to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre during the summer, standing shoulder to shoulder with tourists from around the world in a gallery choked with people, you know what it feels like to be one crammed into small spaces with thousands of other visitors. Imagine that level of crowding throughout a town’s entire tourist district, and you’ll understand why it’s not enjoyable to vacation in popular destinations during the peak season of summer. You can expect multi-hour lines for all kinds of activities and venues, and good luck getting last-minute bookings for popular museums and restaurants. It’s unpleasant for visitors and makes it impossible for locals to go about their days as usual.
As a result, some ports have put per-diem caps on cruise ship visitors (Santorini and Norway, for example), and other destinations—from Nice and Venice to Belfast, Maine—have made headlines for attempting to ban cruise ships, especially the larger ones, from docking in their ports. Others, such as Iceland, have enacted per-day entrance fees on cruisers to encourage the lines to go elsewhere.
As an avid beach lover, I thought visiting Mykonos or Santorini in the off-season months, docking along these islands when bathing-suit weather would be a distant dream, seemed a bit sad. But Windstar’s winter Mediterranean sailings eschew these beach-driven ports in favor of others—like Rome, Naples, and Croatia’s Dubrovnik—where the focus is on history and culture, connecting travelers with museums and palaces that offer more elbow room in winter. Windstar affectionately calls it “locals season” because there are far fewer travelers in town.
French cruise line Ponant is for the first time bringing passengers to Canada’s St. Lawrence River in winter when they can indulge in snow-filled activities like dogsledding.
?PONANT/Julien Fabro Julien Fabro
Climate change has also contributed to the potential for these sailings, as some destinations experience less severe winters. In decades past, visits to places like Budapest, with its sprawling ice-skating rink, and Salzburg in Austria, where snow would cap not just the distant Alps but also the local streets, offered winter wonderland scenes that were lovely sights at first, but the cold often rendered full days of sightseeing challenging and soggy.
On my Danube cruise in February, unlike in Milford Sound, I didn’t miss any attractions due to the season, and we experienced mild temperatures (the thermometer hovered around the 40s and 50s during the day). When there was precipitation, it arrived in the form of light rain instead of snowstorms (of course, this is variable from one year to the next and even one day to another). Bratislava was 58 degrees and sun-drenched when we arrived.
The traveling world has, blissfully, not quite caught on to the reality of winter in some destinations: While weather is always a gamble, it is not always abysmal in winter, depending on where you go. And the town squares in the charming European cities we visited were nearly empty. In Dürnstein, Austria, where passengers stopped before a tour of Melk Abbey, the ship called ahead to ask shopkeepers to open so the town would not feel shuttered to cruise passengers. Here, in one of the most visited spots in the Wachau Valley during the summer, the doors swung open to welcome us and us alone.
We’re likely to see a steady increase in these off-season itineraries, and eventually the secret will get out. Now’s your chance to still be among the first wave of passengers enjoying the relative solitude of sailing during less conventional times of the year.