Aqua Expeditions began with one boat on the Peruvian Amazon in 2007 and ended up owned by the company two entries above it in this volume.
Position
Francesco Galli Zugaro left the curtain business he was running and founded Aqua Expeditions in 2007 as the first luxury small-ship river cruise operator in South America. Aqua Amazon followed in 2008, Aria Amazon in 2011, Aqua Mekong in October 2014, and in 2019 Aqua Blu took the company from rivers to the ocean in East Indonesia. The fleet now runs six vessels across twelve destinations — the Amazon, the Mekong, East Indonesia, the Galápagos, the Seychelles, Tanzania — and no ship carries more than forty guests. His wife Birgit directs the design.
Why it is in the Library
The proposition is stated in his own words and it is the sharpest formulation of the model anywhere in this Part: access is the new measure of luxury. Aqua Mare is a fifty-metre superyacht for sixteen guests in the Galápagos; Aqua Lares is a seventy-seven-metre icebreaker for thirty, running the Seychelles and the Norwegian Arctic on the same hull. Guests book a cabin and get a private-yacht experience without owning the yacht, and most of them have never been on a ship before.
⚑ It now belongs to its neighbour
In January 2025 the Ponant Explorations Group — LHL-313, two rows above in this volume — took a majority stake, backed by Groupe Artémis, the Pinault family’s investment company. Galli Zugaro remains a shareholder and continues to run Aqua as a standalone brand. Part V now contains an owner and its holding side by side, which is worth seeing at a glance.
What this model does not solve
A forty-guest ship on the Amazon carries the same fixed costs as a much larger one and cannot discount its way out of a bad season, which is the pressure that ended Aqua’s independence. ⚡ Galli Zugaro is not in Part IX; the anchor for a person entry now exists and he is a candidate.