2023: Our Year in Review
2023, what a journey it's been! We started the Calling All Ports channel back in January. With only a handful of videos under our belts, we quickly hit 1,000 subscribers in April. And we're ending the year with total video views just shy of 300,000. We're genuinely surprised — and sincerely touched — by how positively Calling All Ports has been received by YouTube viewers and everyone in the cruise community.
We began the year the best way possible: on a cruise! We were midway through a Christmas-New Year's cruise of the Panama Canal onboard the remarkable Regent Seven Seas Splendor. We then sailed the southern Caribbean onboard the Holland America Nieuw Amsterdam, Alaska on the Holland America Koningsdam, the Mediterranean on the Oceania Sirena, the Danube River with Viking River Cruises, New England and Canada on the Carnival Venezia, and the eastern Caribbean on the Norwegian Encore. For the calendar year of 2023, that's 7 cruises and 50 days spent onboard ships. Wow!
It's wild to think that the Regent Seven Seas Splendor cruise which kickstarted our 2023 was only our third-ever cruise, and our first since 2019. Indeed, we started Calling All Ports under the premise that we're experienced world travelers yet relative new-to-cruisers, and our YouTube channel and social media platforms exist to document our experiences as we dive wholeheartedly into the cruising lifestyle. Calling All Ports was (and still is) very much an experiment for us: gaining an understanding of cruise travel and the cruise industry, learning YouTube and new forms of content creation, familiarizing ourselves with the wonderful cruise community, and more.
We've played around with different video styles and formats throughout the year — and we're definitely still figuring out what we do best along with what viewers like you want from us most. No doubt, we'll keep exploring new ideas in 2024. We've got a lot of new videos in the works, along with many more cruises planned, and we're excited to have you continue to join us on our journey!
Thank you for all your support in 2023! And we wish you all a joyous holiday season and a prosperous New Year.
Andrew & Diana