How to Choose an Arctic Expedition Ship

Polar Class, the 200-guest rule, Zodiac maths, helicopters and how the day feels on board. The four questions we ask before we name a ship.

In the Arctic the ship is not where you sleep between landings. It decides which coasts you can reach, how far into the ice you go, how fast the whole ship gets ashore and what the day feels like in between. We have sailed every ship on this site, and this is how we help a guest choose one. It is not a ranking. Each of these ships is the right answer to a different question.

In short

Four things decide it: the hull, the number of guests, what the ship carries to get you off it, and how you like to live on board. In that order.

The hull: what the ice rating really means

Every expedition ship carries an ice rating, and the two scales confuse everyone. The Polar Class scale runs from PC1, year-round in all polar ice, to PC7, summer in thin first-year ice. The older Finnish-Swedish scale, 1A Super down to 1C, was written for the Baltic and sits roughly alongside PC6 and PC7. What matters is what the rating lets the captain do.

Polar Class 2: Le Commandant Charcot alone. Built to break multi-year ice, reach the Geographic North Pole and sail Greenland in April. The only passenger ship in the world with this rating.
Polar Class 5 and 6: SH Vega, SH Diana, Ultramarine, Ocean Explorer, Sylvia Earle and Douglas Mawson. Built to push into the drift ice north of Svalbard, work the edge of the pack and sail the Northwest Passage with an ice pilot.
Ice Class 1C: Le Lyrial, L’Austral and Le Boréal. Strengthened for the summer ice of Svalbard, Greenland and the Passage, sailed around the floes rather than through them, with the comfort of a yacht.

None of this makes one ship better than another. It makes each one right for a route. You do not need a Polar Class 2 hull for Disko Bay in September, and you cannot reach the Pole without one.

Helicopter view of a glacier reaching the sea ice beneath snowy mountains on the Blosseville Coast, East Greenland, a flight from PONANT's Le Commandant Charcot

Helicopter view of PONANT's Le Commandant Charcot navigating sea ice in golden haze off Greenland

Aerial view of PONANT's Le Commandant Charcot on dark water with a large iceberg in the foreground, Blosseville Coast, East Greenland

The number of guests: the 200 rule and the Zodiac maths

Since January 2025 no ship with more than 200 passengers on board may enter the national parks and reserves of Svalbard, and thirteen of the 43 landing sites take 39 people at a time. In the Canadian Arctic and Greenland the limits are set by the communities and the parks. The practical consequence is the same everywhere: the smaller the ship, the more of the day you spend ashore.

The maths is simple. A ship of 130 guests with ten Zodiacs lands everyone in one wave. A ship of 199 with twenty does the same. A ship of 264 with eleven lands in two, which means an hour on the ship while the first group is on the beach. The ships on this site range from 130 guests on Sylvia Earle to 264 on L’Austral and Le Boréal, and the lines manage it differently: the Ponant sister ships cap numbers on Svalbard sailings, Ultramarine carries twenty Zodiacs and two helicopters, Swan Hellenic lands by deck. We tell you how each one works on the route you are considering.

Expedition guests hiking along a stony ridge into the low sun at Hvalsey, with one guest resting in the foreground, South Greenland, on a Swan Hellenic SH Vega expedition cruise

Expedition guests gathered around a guide on the rocks near a blue house in Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island, West Greenland, on a Swan Hellenic SH Vega expedition cruise

Guests in red parkas spread across the sea ice beneath a striped snowy mountain in Scoresby Sund, East Greenland, on a PONANT Le Commandant Charcot cruise

What the ship carries to get you off it

Zodiacs: every ship. The question is how many for how many guests, and whether the boarding platform is at water level, which matters in a swell.
Helicopters: two Airbus H145s on Ultramarine for heli-hiking and flightseeing, two on Le Commandant Charcot for scouting the ice and scenic flights. No other Arctic ship carries them.
Kayaks: every line, as a bookable option limited to a dozen or so places a voyage. Swan Hellenic and Quark run the largest programmes; Ponant offers it on selected outings.
Snowshoes, paddleboards, the polar plunge: carried by most ships and used when the ice and the weather allow.
A science lab and a citizen science programme: Le Commandant Charcot, the Aurora ships and Swan Hellenic. A real part of the day for guests who want it, invisible for those who do not.

Aerial view of PONANT's Le Commandant Charcot among ice floes beneath snowy mountains on the Blosseville Coast, East Greenland

Kayakers paddling through golden mist with the silhouette of PONANT's Le Commandant Charcot behind, on an Arctic expedition cruise

Helicopter view of icebergs on dark water in the bay of Ittoqqortoormiit, Scoresby Sund, East Greenland, a flight from PONANT's Le Commandant Charcot

How you like to live on board

This is the part the brochures cannot tell you and the part we can. The French ships, Ponant’s sister ships and Le Commandant Charcot, are run as yachts: bilingual, Champagne at embarkation, restaurants under Alain Ducasse on Charcot, the day shaped around lunch as much as the landing. The Aurora ships are Australian in tone, with the briefing at the centre of the evening and a team drawn from home. Swan Hellenic sits between the two, Scandinavian in design, with the lecture lounge and the sauna as the heart of the ship. Quark is built around the outings: the largest expedition teams, the most options in the morning briefing, and the gear room as busy as the bar.

Staterooms matter less than people think and location matters more. We know which decks are quietest in the Denmark Strait, which balconies face the ice on the way into the Bellot Strait and where the Zodiac gate noise reaches at six in the morning. That is what we tell you before you choose a category.

Le Commandant Charcot navigating through pack ice

Which ship for which voyage

A first Svalbard week: Le Lyrial from Paris, SH Diana from Copenhagen, Sylvia Earle from Oslo, Ocean Explorer in spring. The choice is about the table and the team, not the ice.
The whole archipelago or the far north-east: Ultramarine with the helicopters, SH Diana on the ten-night circuit, Le Lyrial in July 2028.
The North Pole, or the sea ice of spring: Le Commandant Charcot, and nothing else.
East Greenland and the aurora: Sylvia Earle and Douglas Mawson from Reykjavík, Le Lyrial on the Svalbard to Iceland crossing, SH Vega.
The Northwest Passage: the Ponant sister ships from Greenland with Paris flights, Ultramarine for the full Passage with helicopters, the Aurora ships for an Australian team.
The autumn coast of Canada: Le Boréal, L’Austral or Le Lyrial from Nuuk, Ocean Explorer from Kangerlussuaq, SH Vega on the Viking route.

Layered red cliffs of Teufelsschloss above an iceberg in Kejser Franz Joseph Fjord, East Greenland, cruised by SH Vega on a Swan Hellenic Greenland cruise

Teufelsschloss, Kejser Franz Joseph Fjord, East Greenland. The Devil's Castle's layered red cliffs above an iceberg, cruised by Swan Hellenic's SH Vega.

Questions we are asked about ships

Is a bigger ship more stable?

Not necessarily. Length and the hull shape matter more than guest count. The X-Bow hull on the Aurora and Quark ships cuts through swell rather than riding over it, the Ponant sister ships are long and narrow with stabilisers, and Le Commandant Charcot is heavy enough to ignore most of it. In the ice everything is flat.

Do we need the helicopters?

For the Greenland ice cap and the far north-east of Svalbard, they change the voyage. For a week on the west coast of Spitsbergen, they are a pleasure, not a necessity.

What about ships over 200 guests?

They can no longer enter the Svalbard reserves, which rules them out of most of the archipelago. The Ponant sister ships manage it by capping numbers on those sailings. Elsewhere in the Arctic the limit does not apply. Ask us how the ship you are considering handles it.

Which ship do you sail yourselves?

All of them, which is why we can answer the questions above. We go back to the ones our guests come home talking about, and we tell you which those are for the voyage you have in mind.

See all the ships that sail the Arctic, or tell us the coast and the month and we tell you the ship. Read when to go first if you have not chosen the month.