Lindblad Expeditions

Lindblad Expeditions was founded by Sven-Olof Lindblad in 1979 under the name of Special Expeditions. It was part of Lindblad Travel, a company founded in 1958 that aimed at people who wanted to go 'where no tourist had gone before'. Sven-Olov was born in Switserland and he was injected with adventurous travels by his father, Lars-Eric Lindblad, owner of Lindblad Travel. He was a pioneer in adventure travel and he led the first non-scientific expeditions to Antarctica in 1966 and Galapagos in 1967. As a youngster, Sven-Olof lived in Kenia, surrounded by wildlife and it was here where his fascination for nature and culture really started to came forward.

In 1969, still under the banner of Lindblad Travel, the company launched their first ship, Lindblad Explorer, which was in fact the first privately-owned expeditionship in the world. From 1979 onwards, the ship sailed for Special Expeditions.  

Pioneering the expedition-cruising brand, Special Expeditions focussed mainly on expeditions aboard smaller ships to the regions his father explored before and a number of other remote area's in the world like the Amazon river and China. Delibirately, he kept the ships and parties aboard small to not disturb the natural environments too much and to keep it personal for everyone who attended. You do not want to explore a place where no-one has ever been with a couple of thousand... Aboard the ships, he invited lecturers in history, nature, culture, marine biology and also former expedition leaders. On his ships, there are no shopping streets, rock-climbing walls, large casino's or anything like that. More-over, people aboard like to spent a day in the library, talk in one of the lounges to the other passengers or just be on deck to see what is happening around the ship. 

In 2004, the company, that had re-styled itself as Lindblad Expeditions, formed an alliance with the National Geographic Society, an organisation that is around for more then 125 years and is reaching about 300 million people each month nowadays through magazines, television and website. Because of the alliance, the ships were all re-named with the National Geographic-prefix. Now, the fleet of Lindblad is six ships, after this year the new National Geographic Orion was added to the companies fleet. Next to that, Lindblad also used four ships in charters.

In the summer of 2015, Lindblad merged with Capitol Acquisition Corp. II, a private investment company. Together, the companies started working as Lindblad Expeditions Holdings and the management of the company came into the hands of the Lindblad management. Immidiately, the company announced the building of at least two new cruiseships for delivery in 2017 and 2018.

For booking information, vitsit the website of Lindblad Expeditions.