Hot on the heels of the CMV takeover of Transocean Kreuzfahrten came the news that it had acquired the sales and marketing of another German operator, Passat Kreuzfahrten. Passat operates Delphin, a 470-passenger ship built in 1975 by Wärtsilä in Turku as Byelorussiya, one of a series of five ships for the Black Sea Shipping Co.
After an incident in 1992 when she fell over in dry dock in Singapore, the vessel was towed to Bremerhaven and was later renamed Kazakhstan II. She changed hands several times and was eventually named Delphin in 1998, from which time she has generally been operated by German companies, although she did spend some time under arrest in Venice in 2010 when one of them collapsed.
CMV currently operates the 1964-built Marco Polo and the 1971-built Discovery in the UK market and Astor primarily for British and Australian passengers in winter and German passengers (as Transocean) in the summer. With the Transocean acquisition also came four river cruise ships and the German river programme, which sits well alongside CMV’s own river cruise operation.
