'We are not, this cruise company would have us believe, on a cruise': What life is like on a boat designed to rival luxury yacht charter without the price tag

As the ship sets sail out of the port of Nice and a lounge singer sang French standards on the deck under a billowing tricolore flag, a member of staff explained to me that their company, Ponant, does not talk about ‘cruising’. It talks about ‘travel’. We are not, this cruise company would have us believe, on a cruise. Ponant knows that ‘cruise’ can be a dirty word. It evokes gigantic, impersonal ships, tacky entertainment, hordes of tourists moving cattle-like through port towns, buffet plates and organised fun, places where guest numbers run into their thousands. Fine, if that is your bag, but that is not the bag of the people targeted by Le Ponant, the ship on which I am about to spend three days sailing around the South of France.

The idea is this sailing cruise ship, with a mere 16 state rooms and a crew to guest ratio of 1:1, is as close as you can get to experiencing a private luxury yacht charter without paying private-luxury-yacht-charter prices. A trip on Le Ponant doesn’t come cheap, but it does come considerably cheaper than chartering a ship such as this. I was on board to see what exists in the previously uncharted waters between cruise and private superyacht and whether it feels more like the former or the latter.

I took my mother, because inviting one’s mother on a luxury French voyage is an opportunity to bank daughter points in an amount never previously recorded. We were picked up from Nice airport in a Mercedes-Benz, which seemed a promising start. As we pulled up to the port, we got our first look at Le Ponant. I love a ship myself, but I don’t think you’d need to in order to like this one. She’s elderly enough at 33, but has had a complete refit, completed in 2022, and does not look her age. She has brand new teak decking, a swish spa and fitness area and newly expanded state rooms with balconies. There are sails, too, which everyone on board gathered to see unfurled in the riviera sunset for the first time as we sailed out of port, the first of dozens of glasses of Champagne in our hands.

Le Ponant is a member of Relais & Chateaux, the first sailing yacht to join the company. This means that the food and wine are good — really, really good. Our first five-course meal on board included a sea-bass tartare, langoustine with hollandaise and a selection of Maison Bordier cheeses. Dinner is where the public nature of this yachting experience is most keenly felt. Talking to strangers is not something I naturally find myself wanting to do on holiday. If given the option, I’ll keep myself to myself, yet I was glad not to be given the option here. Apart from anything else, it’s nice to have a small company of new people to turn to as yet another silver tray of Champagne comes around, as you are offered another geometrically perfect cube of French toast topped with caviar and exclaim: ‘My God, I may never know luxury like this again. Santé!’

The state rooms themselves are nice places to be, if you want a moment away from your fellow cruisers. Mine was on the lowest deck of the ship, but chic, with perhaps a dozen pillows on the bed, onto which I could flop to watch 20 minutes of Oppenheimer dubbed into French before falling asleep in the middle of the day. That is to say: sailing on Le Ponant can feel as directionless and pleasantly lazy as any other holiday, if you want it to be. A Ponant cruise, like all cruises, involves an hour-by-hour itinerary of activities. There are entertainments and excursions planned for more or less every moment of our time on board, but there was no pressure to get involved in any of them if we didn’t want to. Better still: despite the fact that we were on a yacht and, therefore, often anchored away from shore, Le Ponant had enough Zodiac boats that you could bail on any given activity halfway through and return to the ship.

Our first full day included a tour of Cassis, on which the guide told us with utmost seriousness that ‘lunch is the most important time in the life of a French person’, a boat tour of the Calanques, swimming and a wine tasting up in the hills above the town. After wandering the old medieval centre of the winding streets of Cassis, we boarded what one of the Ponant staff referred to as ‘the touristic train’, a shuttle of mock train carriages, up to the vineyard. She was at pains to emphasise that this mode of transport ‘is not Ponant’, and was instead a necessity in order to avoid the traffic. I got the sense that as well as ‘cruise’, ‘tourist’ is something of a dirty word here. We are, of course, tourists, but every effort is made so that you don’t feel like one.

After we got back to Le Ponant, about eight deck hands got busy setting up an inflatable pool off the back of the ship, a process that took at least half an hour, and I felt so guilty about the fact that nobody wanted to use it that I went for a swim, despite being cold from swimming already. This was, however, the only time I did anything during this trip that displeased me. In any case, there was a chef preparing crêpes suzette back on deck to warm me up.

There always seemed to be some kind of treat station on board. As soon as the thought ‘I’m a little hungry’ entered your mind, you’d turn around and see a whole leg of Ibérico ham being sliced or a little table of macaroons. On the second night, a Michelin-starred chef from Limoges joined the ship and presented us with a dinner of asparagus blanquette and a rack of veal about which I can give no more ringing endorsement than the fact that I exclaimed out loud in incredulous delight more than once during the meal.

We awoke the following day off St Tropez. Where better to feel as if you are on a private yacht than among 100 examples of the real deal? It didn’t feel as if we were masquerading as private yachters, either. A Le Ponant voyage is an exercise in discretion. If appearances are your concern, nobody is going to be any the wiser that you are not, in fact, on a luxury yacht, but a cruise ship. I don’t see anything so gauche as a lanyard on board or hanging around the neck of the tour guide who showed us around St Tropez: she was wearing Versace shades and blended in perfectly with the locals.

It was somewhat painful to find myself dumped back in the muggy normalcy of Nice airport departures after the glamour of three days aboard Le Ponant. That said, as this is a luxury holiday at a price to reflect that, it seems appropriate to point out some imperfections that might grate with some guests. The ship creaks at night. I didn’t mind, but my mum did. Her bathroom light and fridge remained non-functioning for the duration of the trip. My shower made a strange noise not unlike a meat grinder. That is, however, basically it for complaints. If the private-yacht-charter experience is about feeling maximally catered for, a break from the sense that there is anything you ought to be attending to other than your own enjoyment, then cruising (or, rather, travelling) on Le Ponant is a pretty near match.

Ponant’s seven-night Southern France and the Italian Riviera by Sea cruise with Smithsonian Journeys (from Barcelona to Civitavecchia, Rome) costs from £5,490 per person