CHIMU Adventures founder Greg Carter has announced the launch of his new budget-focused polar line, Terra Nova Expeditions, which will set sail in December 2026 aboard St Helena.
The former mail vessel has been turned into a 98-passenger polar expedition ship, which will offer more frequent and longer shore excursions than larger ships, with lower passenger numbers per voyage.
Carter chats with Cruise Weekly Editor Myles Stedman about his new venture, and the Terra Nova difference.
Myles Stedman: Congratulations on the launch of Terra Nova Expeditions. What was the process like to launch? I imagine starting up a cruise line in Antarctica is not simple.
Greg Carter: Yeah, it’s not super easy. Getting a vessel is the hardest part. Obviously there are not a huge amount of vessels that can do it. You just have to sit around and wait for one to come up and try to nab it, but we’re very very happy with the one we’ve got.
MS: How did you identify St. Helena as the right vessel? What made you look at it and think ‘this is the ship we need’?
GC: What we’ve been looking for since day one is something unique. There are a lot of luxury vessels coming to the market, and that’s well and good, but Antarctica itself is the luxury, right? People want to go to Africa, but they don’t want to go to Africa because of the lodge.
A lot of the ships are getting bigger, which takes away from the true expedition experience. And as a result of the bigger ships, [cruise lines] have been adding more and more to the ships to compensate for what they’re missing out on – passengers generally spend more time on board the ship rather than ashore. The ship sometimes detracts from the expedition experience.
MS: Your product is designed for more frequent and longer shore excursions. How do you manage that? Do the smaller passenger numbers help?
GC: Antarctica stipulates you can’t disembark more than 100 passengers at once. Generally speaking, your “landing slot” is about three hours. So being under 100 passengers, we can actually keep them ashore for the full three hours, whereas a lot of these larger ships like HX have at least 300-400 passengers, so you get far less time.
MS: I’m particularly interested in the concept of the Icebird yacht and the role she plays in the product, because she’s quite unique. How do the logistics of it work?
GC: We take the vessel down to Antarctica, we have her on a charter for a two-month period. The yacht will rendezvous with the main ship (St. Helena), and then we take eight passengers on board and take them off for the day on Icebird.
Because of the size, there are no restrictions on where passengers can land and what they can do, so it allows a lot more flexibility. You might have a bunch of passengers who want to go cross-country skiing, they can charter the vessel for the day. There’s scuba diving and other options like snorkelling which other operators don’t have access to in a really small group. If we know well in advance what they want to do, we can facilitate a lot of different things.
On top of that, when the ship’s repositioning across the Drake Passage, we will also offload passengers onto the Icebird and they effectively do a 20-day itinerary with six nights aboard.
MS: Will the Icebird be bookable in advance?
GC: She’s bookable and payable in advance. If we do have capacity – if someone pulls out, or we only sell six out of eight spots – we’ll offer it up on board, but to be honest, the amount of interest we’ve had in Icebird has been pretty spectacular. We only launched two weeks ago and we’ve already got agents talking to us about taking the whole vessel for family groups.
On day trips, we’re looking at US$1,200 per day, and while we’re finalising the prices of the 20-day trip, it’ll be around the US$20,000 mark.
MS: With everything included, how can you afford to operate at this price?
GC: [It’s] our first year, our pricing’s probably a bit more aggressive than it will be going forward, but there are a couple of reasons for it. The biggest variable cost in expedition cruising is fuel, and the ship herself has quite a long range. Ushuaia is probably one of the most expensive places to fill up a ship in the world, due to its remoteness and monopoly, so because the ship has pretty long legs, we can minimise our refuelling during the course of the Antarctic season. Our operating costs are pretty slim, we don’t have huge marketing expenditure, we’re going to be very much a wholesale model.
The other part of it is she is an older vessel. A lot of these new guys have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new ships, and in the industry, there’s a lot of debt at the moment. A lot of cruise lines are having to pay back shareholders, banks, and investors, and especially after COVID, they were without income for a few years. We’re bringing new capital into the industry, where a lot of others are pretty heavy on debt.
MS: You mentioned you’re going to be distributing through wholesale. How else are you planning to get in front of the industry and agents?
GC: Look, I think with our price point and the uniqueness of the vessel, I think we will pick up some direct bookings. But we’re carrying about 1,000 passengers per year, which is less than 1% of the whole Antarctic market. We’re not coming in to take over. It’s an independent product too, and there’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry.
There are a lot of Antarctic specialists and wholesalers out there who have done a great job for the last decade, and I think they’re getting a bit disenfranchised with the industry and the way it has gone. There are a lot that are begging for vessels like St. Helena, that are frustrated with the larger sizes. They’re also frustrated with a lot of bigger cruise lines – Viking, Silversea, Seabourn – who have a very different retail model to the traditional Antarctic operators, which are squeezing out the specialists with great knowledge.
MS: You said there’s a bit of disenfranchisement out there with the way things are in Antarctica. What are the gaps in the market you’re looking to fill? I know being a more accessible option is one of them.
GC: The big thing about the ship is that it’s flexible. The staterooms are very versatile, you can have a double bed, two single beds, a lot of them can be quads or triples, and we can tailor them depending on the group or wholesaler we’re working with. That will allow us to carry scientists too.
I think everyone else is going the other way, and is going really top-end, for high-spending clients. I think Antarctica should be accessible for everybody, and that’s a big part of our mantra. We’ve already had a lot of interest from student groups, school groups, markets like that. We’re targeting a younger demographic.
MS: How big are you looking to grow?
GC: We’re not out to launch a thousand ships. We’ll grow organically, and if we see another vessel come up, and she suits us, we’re certainly in the position to grab her.
Team-wise, we’re looking to add another three or four people by the end of the year. We do have a Reservations Manager starting in Australia in a couple of weeks’ time, but to be honest, we’re probably going to keep it as lean as possible.
MS: Do you have anything else to add about Terra Nova?
GC: We’re not something to everybody. We’re not coming in and taking luxury clients because that’s not our bag. We’re not trying to appeal to everyone, we realise we’re a very niche product, and the idea is to provide good value and responsible Antarctica product.
