About CDV Cruises
CDV Cruises is a division of Culture Discovery Vacations. We began in 2006 as a very different kind of tour company, and we have treated every traveler as a guest ever since.
It started with a simple question
CDV was founded in 2006 as a United States company operating tours in Italy. Calling them tours is almost misleading, because we started specifically to do things differently from nearly every other tour company. Where most operators check off sightseeing boxes and treat their customers like cattle, we set out to give people something real and life changing.
The idea was to treat guests like family. The formula was simple: if dear friends from across the world came to visit for a week, what would that week look like? We would see some of the famous sights, but casually. We would share the places most tourists never find, take everyone to the restaurants the locals rave about, introduce them to our friends, and cook together over long family dinners. Fully immersive, start to finish.
The words client and customer do not exist in our culture. When you are with us, you are a guest, and we mean it literally. Our tours are all inclusive, because a host would never ask a guest to pick up a tab. It worked so well that we expanded into nine regions of Italy plus Portugal, and we are actively cultivating new experiences in Spain, Croatia, Israel, India and Uruguay.
“You can stay in a five star resort, take an ultra luxury cruise, and have a private guide tell you the history of what you are looking at. That may be luxurious, but many of us yearn for something more: a deep connection with the soul of the places we travel. We call it next level luxury, and it is in our DNA.”
A tour operator becomes your travel agency
Over the years we built a large family of guests, and they often paired their time with us with a cruise or other travel. We found ourselves helping plan that travel again and again, so we formalized it. Because we already had the infrastructure of a direct tour operator, becoming a travel agency was simply a matter of the right accounts and the right relationships.
That order matters. Where a new agent slowly builds credibility with a cruise line, we call the line, explain that we are CDV, and are soon speaking with senior executives. The benefit for you: we manage the entirety of your trip and make sure everything lines up, and because we operate our own tours on the ground, we make combining a CDV land tour with a cruise that begins or ends near our tour regions completely seamless.
Cruises far beyond our own tours
What began as booking travel around our tours quickly grew into everything: a voyage to Antarctica, a river cruise on the Nile, a safari in Africa. Our guests fit the luxury market beautifully, so that is where much of our work lives, before and after their time at sea.
Before long, people were finding us specifically for cruises rather than tours. Some still join a tour eventually, but one thing never changes. If we were booking for our own brother or sister, how carefully would we make sure everything went well, and how available would we be for every question? That is how we work for you.
Everything that makes us CDV
Exclusive specials
Offers you cannot get directly from the cruise lines on thousands of sailings a year, with free onboard credit, included excursions or gratuities.
Plus every qualifying offer
Our exclusive offers can almost always be combined with the cruise line current national promotions, plus full credit toward loyalty status.
The luxury of experience
We plan life experiences, not just bucket list stops, powered by people who genuinely care, leading technology and carefully cultivated relationships.
Seamless land and sea
Because we operate our own tours on the ground, we make it seamless to pair a cruise with a CDV land tour when your voyage begins or ends near our tour regions.
We also operate the highest rated culinary tours in Europe
Culture Discovery directly operates the highest rated culinary, cooking, wine and experiential small group tours in Europe. Because we run them ourselves, we make it seamless to combine one with a cruise that begins or ends near our tour regions, so a voyage at sea can become the start of a much larger story.
Let us plan your next voyage
Complimentary and no obligation. Tell us where you dream of sailing and we will take it from there.