Meet Heidi Sarna

Heidi’s Background — How It All Began

So far, I’ve explored 78 countries around the world by boat, road, plane, foot, bicycle and camel. My first big journey was a six-month trip around the world back in the days when Pan Am sold a 16-leg flight package for a song. My future husband and I hit 20 countries on six continents with memorable adventures including a three-day “cruise” down the Amazon aboard a rickety fishing boat held together with a combination of luck and rust.

Not too surprisingly, after this trip and armed with a master’s degree in American and English Lit, I landed a job at a travel magazine. A cruise magazine to be precise. A few years later, I left to become a freelance writer and as fate would have it, have spent most of my career penning travel articles and guidebooks, many about cruises. I’m a member of SATW, the Society of American Travel Writers, and proud to have won several Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism awards.

Check out my CV for more details!

My credits over my long career include co-authoring Secret Singapore, a book about Singapore’s hidden heritage; Frommer’s Cruises and Ports of Call for a decade; plus several editions of Frommer’s European Cruises and Cruise Vacations for Dummies. A stack of newspaper, magazine and web credits includes everything from CNBC.com, Conde Nast Traveler, CNN.com, Afar.com, USA Today and ForbesTraveler.com to the Star Ledger, International Herald Tribune and Singapore’s Straits Times. Throw in hundreds of stories for Frommers.com, along with The Points Guy, Porthole, Travel Weekly, Cruise Travel and Singapore’s Expat Living, and you should get the picture. I’ve written a lot about cruises and travel, based on my experiences globetrotting aboard more than 125 ships large and small, and it’s those small ones that have always been my favorites.

Up-close and personal Alaska cruises on the small Cruise West ships and crazy Caribbean adventures aboard Windjammer Barefoot Cruises pirate-y schooners got me hooked on small ships many moons ago, and though both those lines are now, sadly, defunct, their legacy lives on in QuirkyCruise.

I met Ted Scull in the early 1990s while living in New York, and we became colleagues and fast friends. From 2006 – 2023, before moving back to the US to the DC area, I was based in Singapore with my husband and twin sons, loving the awesome travel ops and even the heat and those dramatic tropical downpours. Spending much of my adult life in two of the world’s busiest ports has been a quirky coincidence professionally, but collaborating on this site with one of the world’s most respected ship authorities and travel writers seems to be my destiny — and an absolute honor. Thank you Ted!

Heidi’s Favorite QuirkyCruise Articles