The Best Alaska Cruise is a Small Boat Adventure Cruise

We boarded the UnCruise Wilderness Discoverer in Juneau, a small expedition-style boat with 30ish guest cabins, as it was anchored next to a 15-story cruise liner. Swarms of tourists filed out of the cruise ship, spreading like ants to their respective tour buses. 

Huddled together with our bags were 59 UnCruise passengers. And unlike the cruise ship guests, we had no idea where we were heading. Apart from Glacier Bay, our route through Southeast Alaska was a giant question mark (just how I like it!). 

UnCruise is different. There is no set itinerary, no ports, and no two trips that follow the same route. In fact, after leaving Juneau, we never set foot in a port again. No crowded cruise ship docks or overpriced excursions. No t-shirt shops with “SALE” plastered on every window. Instead, we anchored in hidden bays, tucked up against towering glaciers, and watched whales from kayaks. We had entire empty beaches & glaciers to ourselves; it was just us and whatever we saw along the way. 

And that’s how people should experience Alaska. 

What is UnCruise? A Different Way to Cruise Alaska 

When people think about Alaska cruises, their first thought is probably a Carnival, Princess, or Holland America ship, with towering decks stacked above the water and thousands of other travelers on board. The problem with those big cruise ships is accessibility. You'll see nature and towering glaciers from afar, but if you want to get up close and personal, you'll have to book separate tours and load onto packed buses, sharing the experience with hundreds or thousands of other tourists pulled from a half dozen ships in port that day. 

UnCruise takes a different approach. Instead of a floating city, you're on a small ship carrying somewhere between 22 and 86 guests. The ship is small enough to nose into coves and inlets the big liners can't touch, and to anchor for the night in places with no dock at all. No other boats, no towns, no infrastructure. Just the wilds of Alaska and the adventures that lie ahead. 

Onboard, expect five-star multi-course meals, a full expedition team, and a hell of a lot of fun. I hate to even compare it to a cruise, because the two experiences are so completely opposite. If you want up-close-and-personal in Alaska, UnCruise can’t be beat. 

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What to Expect on an UnCruise Alaska Adventure 

1. Customizable Daily Activities 

Every day on an UnCruise ship there are morning and afternoon activities to choose from. It might look something like this:

Morning: Choose between a glacier hike, eco-meander, kayak, or skiff tour.
Afternoon: Choose between a bushwhack, kayak, skiff tour, eco-meander, or guided hike. 

Popular activities are segmented into different departure times, so there are never more than 8 people on any guided activity at a time. Don’t feel like doing an activity? Relax on the boat instead, where you can do puzzles, head up to the bridge for a navigation lesson, or soak in the hot tub. 

2. Five-Star Dining (and a Pastry Chef!) 

This was perhaps my biggest surprise of traveling with UnCruise. Every day, the chef curates a unique menu, which includes three main-course dinner options. Don’t like seafood? No problem! Every night there is a meat, a seafood, and a vegetarian option. Want to try all three options? Also not a problem! Oh, and don’t even get me started on all-you-can-eat dungeness crab night.

And if that didn’t sell you enough, every boat has its very own pastry chef. Fresh bread, homemade desserts, and endless pastries & cookies throughout your entire stay. 

3. All-Inclusive EVERYTHING 

No add-on drink packages, no $30 Wi-Fi day passes, no expensive unpersonalized day excursions. To put it into perspective, a whale watching excursion in Juneau through Carnival Cruiseline is roughly $230 per person. If you have a family of 4, that’s $920 for a single activity with a busload of people. 

Meanwhile, at UnCruise, you get two daily activities for everyone onboard, all included and led by your onboard expedition team. Then come back to the boat for daily happy hour, no drink vouchers needed. 

4. Unplugged Adventures 

Wi-Fi is only turned on between the hours of 7:00pm and 9:00am, as a way to promote unplugging and enjoying the true wilderness and spirit of adventure. As a self-admitted workaholic, this made me a little nervous. But by day two, I was already relaxing more, breathing more, and leaning into puzzles and board games in the common room. It was a breath of fresh air! 

5. Small Ship, Big-Access Personalized Itineraries 

Our boat could fit 78 passengers and 28 crew members. That’s nearly 1 crew member per two passengers. And that’s about average for UnCruise. The crew do everything to make guests Alaska dreams come true. For example, after high demand onboard for an additional open-paddle day, our Expedition Leader Erin reworked the itinerary to take the boat to a better inlet to make open paddle accessible again. Then, on the last day, we skipped the Sawyer Glacier due to cruise ship traffic, and instead went to LeConte Glacier for a private viewing, without a cruise ship in sight. It’s those little things that truly make the trip! 

6. The Onboard Naturalists/Expedition Team

Every member of the expedition team is an expert in their respective outdoor niche. And every night, a crew member offers a presentation on their realm of expertise: glaciology, marine biology, local Tlingit history, wildlife, flora, etc. You name it - there is likely an expert onboard! A really neat added element that allows a greater understanding of the ecosystems encountered throughout the trip. 

7. A Boat Family 

We boarded the boat with 59 strangers. We left it with a lifelong UnCruise family. We exchanged phone numbers, made plans to visit each other across the country, and said "see you again!" instead of "goodbye." Long hugs, dinner plans for that same evening, and plans exchanged like we'd known each other for years.

That was the most pleasant surprise — the people. The friendships made along the way. The laughs at dinner, the jokes at sunset. I boarded thinking we'd probably meet a few people. Instead, we left with a whole new community. We had a hell of a week together, and I'd give anything to relive it.

The Best Alaska Cruise Itineraries from UnCruise

Uncruise offers numerous different Alaska itineraries. We did the Glacier Bay Adventure Cruise With Two Days in Glacier Bay. This itinerary is 7 nights, and runs from Juneau to Juneau. Every itinerary is slightly different, but lightly follows this route:

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Other noteworthy Alaska Adventure Cruise Itineraries Include:

Wild, Wooly, and Wow With Glacier Bay (7 Nights)

Glacier Bay National Park With Inside Passage & San Juan Islands (12 nights) 

Northern Passages with Glacier Bay & Sitka (7 nights) 

Alaska Coastal Treasures (13 nights) 

The Real Cost of the Big Ships

It's easy to overlook what a fleet of 3,000-passenger ships actually does to a place the size of a small town. On a busy day, Juneau can see five large ships (there were five ships in port that day we boarded) and upward of 16,000 cruise passengers disembark at once. 

That volume has consequences beyond crowded sidewalks. Most large ships run scrubbers to meet emissions rules, but the tradeoff is water pollution: a single mid-size cruise ship can discharge tens of thousands of tons of scrubber wastewater a day, laced with heavy metals and other contaminants that settle into the same waters locals fish and harvest from. 

It's one more reason a 60-passenger UnCruise ship feels like a different category of travel altogether…not just smaller, but lighter on the places it visits.