Operations
The company’s mottos of “a path less traveled” and “it’s in our nature to explore” are apt descriptions of the nature of operations of OEC. The concept behind the formation of the operation was to bring Australian based luxury expedition style cruising to a level never seen before in that country. There had never been an expedition vessel as luxurious and as sophisticated as the MV Orion permanently based in Australia before.
In 2005 OEC made history by being the first cruise line to take a ship into the newly independent nation of East Timor. Visiting the capital Dili and the nation’s second largest center Baucau, guests of the Orion were some of the first tourists to be part of organized travel in the country. OEC planned to continue and expand their operations in East Timor in 2006, but the company’s plans were suspended when the tiny nation descended into politically inspired chaos just a few weeks before the Orion was due to dock in Dili in June 2006. The Indonesian port of Kupang in West Timor has replaced Dili in OEC’s itinerary until the situation in East Timor stabilises enough to resume cruises there.
Current operations see the company offering expedition cruises to Antarctica from the Australian island of Tasmania and the New Zealand port of Bluff, in the rugged Kimberley region of Western Australia from the port of Darwin, to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands from the ports of Cairns and Rabaul as well as occasional cruises along the east coast of Australia focussing on the Great Barrier Reef and some cruising around Tasmania.
Read more about this topic: Orion Expedition Cruises
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)