HX's 1896 Cabin Just Won Expedition Initiative of the Year. You Can Sleep in It for a Night.

The news, and why it’s more than a stunt

On September 16, 2026, at the 20th anniversary Seatrade Cruise Awards, HX Expeditions took home Expedition Cruise Initiative of the Year for a single room. Not a ship, not a route, not a new hybrid engine. One cabin, aboard MS Fridtjof Nansen, built to look and feel like the stateroom a traveler would have slept in on the very first expedition cruise, 130 years ago.

I’ll admit my first reaction was that this is the kind of thing a marketing team cooks up on a slow Tuesday. Then I read what’s actually in the room and how the night works, and I changed my mind. It’s a small, clever, slightly obsessive piece of history you can sleep inside, on a ship we already know well, and it’s a one-night add-on rather than a commitment. So this is the post where I tell you what it is and then, in the spirit of everything else we do, offer to book it for you.

What’s actually in the room

The 1896 Cabin sits aboard one of HX’s newest, hybrid-powered ships and looks nothing like the rest of it. The walls are reclaimed timber: more than 140 pieces of oak plank and beam salvaged from old barns and cabins across Europe, so the room smells and creaks like something that has been at sea for a century rather than something bolted into a 2020 hull.

The details are where it gets good. Maritime antiques scattered around the room, sourced from markets across Europe: vintage trunks, old maps, and a barrel that turns out to have a small bar concealed inside it. A fireplace built to look like the shipboard stove that would have kept an 1896 cabin from freezing. A proper porthole. Bunk-style berths for up to three people, which is either romantic or a family dare depending on who’s booking. HX even commissioned a custom scent for the space, meant to read as aged timber and sea air.

There are no windows in the modern sense, no balcony, and no espresso machine. That’s the point. Everything else on the Nansen is designed to make polar travel comfortable; this one room is designed to make you feel how far the comfort has come.

Why 1896

The cabin takes its name from the year the company sailed what it calls the world’s first expedition cruise: from mainland Norway north to Svalbard, the archipelago halfway between the Norwegian coast and the North Pole, at a time when leisure travel to the Arctic simply didn’t exist. HX was Hurtigruten Expeditions until the rebrand, and before that the expedition arm of the Norwegian coastal company; it’s now a standalone line out of London. The full family tree is in our HX guide, if you want it.

There’s a second reason the year fits, and HX doesn’t need to spell it out. 1896 is also the year Fridtjof Nansen came home from his attempt on the North Pole aboard the wooden ship Fram, the expedition that made him the most famous polar explorer alive. The ship this cabin sits on is named for him. The sister ship is named for Roald Amundsen, who sailed the same Fram to the South Pole. The oak-and-stove room on a hybrid ship called Nansen, marking the year Nansen returned, is about as tidy as maritime history gets.

How the night works

This is the part that makes it bookable rather than a museum piece. The 1896 Cabin is a one-night experience, not a cabin category. You book your normal stateroom or suite for the voyage, and on one night of the trip you move into the 1896 Cabin, sleep there, and go back to your own bed the next day with a story.

The price is around €100 per person, roughly $116 at the time of writing, and you can reserve it before departure or on board, subject to availability. Every euro goes to the HX Foundation, the line’s charitable arm, which funds conservation, science and community projects in the places HX ships visit. So the night is also a donation, which is a nicer way to spend a hundred euros than most things you’ll be offered on a ship.

If you don’t get a night, you can still see it: on embarkation days the cabin is open for guests to walk through before the evening’s occupants move in. The launch is part of HX’s wider 130th anniversary program on the Nansen, with heritage-inspired menus, commemorative keepsakes and onboard talks on the company’s history.

The ship around it

Everything outside that one oak door is thoroughly modern. MS Fridtjof Nansen carries 490 guests, runs on a hybrid-electric system that lets her go quiet in sensitive water, and is built around a Science Center rather than a casino. Three restaurants, a pool and hot tubs on the aft deck, a spa and sauna, and the Explorer Lounge with the big windows where most people end up between landings. We’ve sailed her sister, Roald Amundsen, through Alaska, and the two ships are close to identical inside.

If you’re wondering how a 490-guest ship handles Antarctica’s 100-people-ashore rule, we wrote about exactly that this week. Short version: it runs landings, Zodiac cruises and kayaks at the same time, and nobody misses an outing.

Where the Nansen sails, and where we’d add the night

The 1896 Cabin is available on select Nansen sailings in 2026, and her program this year covers Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, Alaska, Chile and Antarctica. Three of those are itineraries we’ve built out day by day:

• Disko Bay, Greenland, 12 days: the Ilulissat icefjord and the west coast. An oak cabin with a stove on a night among the icebergs is the version of this we’d pick.
• Grand Greenland from New York, 16 days: sail out of Manhattan and end up among the glaciers, no Copenhagen flight required.
• Antarctica, South Georgia and the Falklands, 23 days: the full southern circuit, on a 23-day trip long enough that one night in a bunk is a welcome change of scene.

Ask us which 2026 departures carry the cabin and we’ll check availability for your dates. It’s a limited thing, one room per ship per night, so the popular sailings will book it out early.

The other ways to sleep somewhere strange at sea

HX isn’t the only line selling a night outside your cabin, and the comparison is worth a paragraph. National Geographic-Lindblad puts glass igloos on the top deck of Endurance and Resolution, so you sleep under the midnight sun or the Arctic sky. Celebrity’s Galápagos ship Flora does a glamping night in private cabanas on the top deck. Both are about the view outside.

HX’s is the opposite: it’s about the room itself, and the 130 years between the person who slept there first and you. If you’ve done the igloo, this is the other half of the collection.

How to book it

Tell us which region and which dates you have in mind, and whether the 1896 night is a must-have or a nice-to-have. We’ll come back with the Nansen departures that carry it, the cabin category we’d pair it with, and the night we’d choose (icebergs beat open ocean). If a discounted Nansen sailing lands on the Antarctica Cruise Drop app, you’ll see the ship profile on the deal and can ask us to add the cabin to the hold. And if you’re still deciding between the Nansen and the smaller polar ships, our Antarctica ship comparison lines them all up.

Request a quote for a Nansen voyage with the 1896 night included, or start here if you’d rather talk it through first.