Cruise & Ferry Review - Autumn/Winter 2020

5 6 INTERV IEW Maintaining course Mystic Invest’s Mario Ferreira’s ambitious expansion into the expedition sector may not have surprised many people, but his rise is breathtaking. Sam Ballard reports M ário Ferreira is a European cruising titan and, having gone from a waiter onboard Cunard to a shipping magnate, he is one of the industry’s great success stories. His biography tracks the rise of the industry itself. From first making his mark with Portuguese river operator DouroAzul to expanding onto Europe’s main rivers by buying a majority stake in Nicko Cruises in 2015, he has capitalised on the renaissance the sector has undergone. He’s now set to capitalise on another trend: expedition cruising. Mystic Invest – the company behind Nicko and DouroAzul – now has another name on its books: Atlas Ocean Voyages. The USA-based expedition cruise line will operate five ships from a fleet of expedition cruise ships that are currently being built by Ferreira (World Navigator in 2021, World Traveller and World Seeker in 2022, and World Adventurer and World Discoverer in 2023). World Explorer, the first ship in the series, launched last year and is currently sailing for Quark Expeditions while Nicko will get its own expedition ship when World Voyager launches next year. However, with Covid-19 playing havoc with the cruise industry, have Ferreira’s plans for a fleet of expedition ships been derailed? “No, we maintained our expansion plans as they were before the pandemic,” he explains. “World Voyager is almost ready to be delivered and we are already fast at work with World Navigator, which we’ll launch in 2021. While the majority “We maintained our expansion plans as they were before the pandemic”