Tom Hoster (pictured below) is Travel Weekly’s most recent addition to its editorial crew. Our person in Silicon Valley, Tom is an extremely well-travelled, quick-witted North American. When Tom’s not working on new material for his semi-regular columns for Travel Weekly, he’s scratching together a living in his own consultancy drawing on his more than 40 years of finance experience, including 15 years in banking in New York City and 25 years in Silicon Valley, serving as Chief Financial Officer at eight Silicon Valley start-ups in technology and medical devices over the past 20 years.

What do you look for in an onboard cabin? Nine out of ten people would say, “Space!”. I beg to differ. I look for intelligent design.

We just returned from a ten-day cruise to Antarctica on Aurora Expeditions’ Greg Mortimer. The ship was purpose-built for expedition cruises, and it shows. Everything about our cabin showed the architect’s attention to intelligent design. What made our cabin so successful? Let me elaborate:

• There was a ton of storage space in the cabin. Between the closet, desk, and bedside tables, we had 22 drawers. There was plenty of opportunities to put your trousers in one drawer, your sweaters in another drawer, your hats and gloves in another drawer, and so on. You get the idea. And each drawer had a mechanism that kept them shut in even the roughest of seas.
• Stowage is different from storage. It is places to put things away for the duration of the trip. Our luggage fit comfortably under the bed, and the top shelf of the closet was designed to hold our life preservers.
• Lots of shelves, most of them with a little bar to keep items on them in rolling seas. Very handy for cameras, masks, books and so on.
• What good is a closet if there are no hangers? We had no fewer than 24 hangers in our closet – plenty of possibilities for hanging coats, fleeces, shirts, and so on.
• In addition to the drawers, closet, and shelves, we had two cabinets for storing things, which meant that we avoided the clutter that often plagues cruisers.
• We had several plugs in our cabin that took our converters, but our space also had USB plugs for charging phones, which is what you really need.
• Blackout curtains. Summers in the Arctic and winters in Antarctica make for some very long days. They are fun to experience, but they can be tough to sleep through.
• Hot water. Plenty of it.
• Working sink stopper. Seems easy enough, but a sink without a working stopper can make it tough when you are inserting your contact lenses.
• Drying cable. Long cruises – especially ones that include activities like hiking and kayaking – lead to periodic handwashing. A cable that extends in the shower to hang the laundry means that items have a place to dry overnight.
• Floor-to-ceiling windows bring the outside in to your little box.
• We had two sturdy chairs that we could sit in while the icebergs float by.
• Our balcony gave us our own private space outdoors, although, with temperatures hovering around zero degrees, the deck chairs that were provided were never used.
• Our cabin had wonderful, bright lighting. And the individual reading lights on each side of the bed were on goosenecks so they could be aimed perfectly at your book.

Tom has received an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and an MBA from Stanford.

The public spaces on the Greg Mortimer were also intelligently designed, but that is a subject for another article. The thought that went into the design of our cabin made our time there a joy.