A Floating Hotel Whose Address Is the Ocean: Anna Nash on Explora Journeys

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Anna Nash, President of Explora Journeys, the ultra-luxury ocean travel brand of the MSC Group. Nash spent more than two decades in luxury hospitality, in senior roles at Aman, Rosewood and Orient-Express, before taking charge of Explora in 2024. She came up through marketing and communications, and it shows in how she talks about the brand. Rather than a cruise line, she calls Explora a floating hotel whose address is the ocean. The full conversation is available to watch below.

A floating hotel whose address is the ocean

Nash is direct about the problem the category carries. For many people, the word cruise still signals something that is not for them. She does not think the industry failed at marketing. It marketed very successfully to a particular kind of customer, and built a fixed idea of what a cruise is. Explora is trying to step outside that idea.

So the language changes. The brand talks about ocean travel rather than cruising, because the phrase carries the emotion and the feeling, and it makes the decision simpler for someone weighing it up. Being privately owned, Nash said, gives the brand permission to have a voice, to challenge the conventions of the category, and to bring back some of the romance and elegance the word cruise had lost.

Explora is still young. Explora I launched in 2023, Explora II in 2024, and Explora III arrives this year, with a full fleet of six ships expected by 2028. Nash calls it a challenger brand, and the challenge is as much to the language as to the ships.

The first-time sailor

A striking share of Explora's guests are new to the water. Around thirty percent have never cruised before, which Nash described as a double opportunity, since they are new to the brand and new to sailing at once. That carries a responsibility to meet expectations the guest has never had tested.

She talked about understanding each guest's need state, the reason they are travelling at all. Someone might be travelling alone, reconnecting with family, on honeymoon, or working through a bereavement. The brand's job is to know which, especially for first-time sailors, and that group is growing quickly as more ships enter the market.

What these guests tell her afterwards is consistent. They point to the focus on ocean wellness, the spa and the indoor and outdoor gyms, and they say they cannot understand why they did not do this sooner. There was no Explora before, Nash noted, so there was nothing quite like it to try.

Giving back time

The pitch underneath all of this is time. When you board, Nash said, you are untethered from land, and even with the high-speed Wi-Fi the ship carries, you feel yourself disconnect. Everything is included and everything is handled. You are not stuck in traffic, heading back to the airport or chasing a dinner reservation across town. You unpack once, and you have arrived.

That, she argued, is what beats a land-based holiday. The logistics fall away, and the brand hands you back the one thing it cannot manufacture, time. Simone offered an analogy from the psychologist Jacques Lacan, whose mirror stage describes how a small child feels like the centre of the universe until the world teaches it otherwise. Travel, he suggested, returns you to that feeling. Nash took it as a fair description of Explora, where the guest sits at the centre and the rest is taken care of.

That guest focus is not a slogan for her. The brand was built, she said, on the art of listening, and her own job is to make sure people choose Explora for the right reasons, on the right journey and in the right suite, with their expectations set clearly before they sail. Once that is done, the brand has to deliver on the service.

The ocean state of mind

Explora builds its experience around a phrase, the ocean state of mind. Nash describes it as a feeling that being at sea, untethered from land, brings on by itself. She traces it to the brand's owners, the Aponte family, whose maritime history she puts at more than three hundred years, and who understand what the horizon does to a person.

The point is that everyone finds their own version of it. For one guest it might be seven in the morning on the rowing machine on deck, just them, the horizon, the birds and the sound of the water rushing past. For another it is a first cup of coffee on the suite's terrace with a book. The common thread is the pause. Slow down, take the moment, and the state arrives.

Technology stays invisible

The interview ended on the HumanX question, the future as humans and technology together rather than one against the other. Nash was clear about the order of things. Explora is a human business, in hospitality for the one-to-one service, what she called the nobility of service. Technology has a real place, working quietly behind that. It makes the operation more efficient and handles the procedures and the reservations, and the best version of it is invisible.

What it will not do is take over the human part. When a guest experience has to be recovered, when there is a complaint to resolve, that has to come from a person. Technology will not deliver a genuine smile or the eye contact she sees as the heart of hospitality. Her conclusion is that the two have to work hand in hand. The technology keeps improving and growing more complex, and the brand has to keep its eyes open and bring it along, so that the systems get better and the people are freed to do what they are there for, which is to look after the guest in person.