To be informed that there are Costco cruises to Antarctica could be doubly surprising – you may not be aware that Costco offers cruises, and you also might not know that there are cruises to Antarctica. In fact, there are cruises to Antarctica, and Costco would be happy to sell you one, at least if they could (more on this in moment). Below we outline Costco’s Antarctic cruise offerings, as it were, explaining what a cruise to Antarctica is and how you can go about finding one.
(See update below.)
The first thing you should know about Costco’s cruises to Antarctica is that they don’t exist, at least if you understand a “cruise to Antarctica” as, well, a cruise to Antarctica. Cruises to Antarctica must obviously sail to (or at least near) the continent of Antarctica, and while such cruises exist, they don’t seem to be offered by Costco. Rather, Costco seems to offer something more like cruises to the Arctic, even though you list “Antarctica” as your cruise destination when searching for your cruise on the Costco Travel website. And in truth Costco doesn’t really offer cruises to the Arctic either, as it doesn’t appear that any of the cruises they offer actually go this far north. (For the record, the Arctic is polar region at the northernmost point on earth, and Antarctica is the polar region at the southern end of the globe that is also a continent. The two are occasionally confused.) So, basically, there are not Costco cruises to Antarctica, or so our fairly exhaustive searching suggests, even though Costco Travel clearly implies otherwise. Perhaps Costco used to partner with one of the cruise ships that sails to Antarctica, but no longer does. And it is also possible that Costco will offer cruises to Antarctica in the future. For now, though, there appear to be no Costco cruises to Antarctica.
Although there is no need to dwell on fictional cruises, it is worth mentioning as we conclude that what are termed “cruises to Antarctica” by Costco are actually just Costco’s cruises to Alaska, a subject we have already covered. They generally start in Vancouver or Seattle and stop at a few destinations in between (Glacier Bay, College Fjord, and so on). These are northern, cold destinations, but they aren’t technically in the Arctic, and they certainly aren’t in Antarctica. So, once again, Costco does not offer cruises to Antarctica. They offer something kind of similar with their Alaskan cruises, which for whatever reason are labeled as “cruises to Antarctica,” but these don’t involve Antarctica in anyway. Again, however, there are cruises to Antarctica, just not through Costco.
(Update: Having now written about virtually every destination to which a Costco cruise sails, we have stumbled across one cruise from Buenos Aires to the Antarctic Peninsula. You can find it by searching the cruises to South America. So, there technically is a Costco cruise to Antarctica, it is just listed as a cruise to South America.)
