Tired of the same old holiday options? Take these trips with a twist for tenacious travellers
Travelling with like-minded people has become the new way to holiday as boutique businesses focus on special interest travel
4 min
They were knitting in the piano lounge, crocheting at the bar and pulling out their craft bags during bingo. For the ladies of the Unwind craft group, casting on and off was just as important as seeing the sites on their cruise to New Zealand.
The group of women who met at Melbourne’s Unwind Craft Café have set off on four craft cruises together and every time owner Robyn Scipione announces a new trip, it sells out in hours. Part of the attraction is to learn new sewing skills, but a much bigger part is to connect with each other while relaxing on the high seas.
If a knitting cruise sounds unusual, consider this – Carnival has a four-night cat lover’s cruise from Florida to Mexico, there is a Star Trek cruise to Aruba with Royal Caribbean and there’s even a nude cruise out of Tampa, Florida, also available through the popular cruise company.
But it’s not just cruises that offer special interest travel options. Whether you are looking to walk in the footsteps of the Anzacs, want to pick up a cooking tip or two from an Italian nonna or sing along to your favourite band, there is a trip for that.
Anna Shannon, a former Flight Centre travel agent, set up a website called TravelAgentFinder.com.au that helps connect travellers with agents that specialise in specific areas of travel. It could be as simple as finding a Disneyland expert, or as complex as someone looking to trace their ancestor’s footsteps on the Western Front.
“Themed travel is definitely on the rise and it makes sense to me,” the travel expert says. “Travelling is awesome, but when you’re travelling with like-minded people who share your passion for X, Y or Z, it’s an even more enriching experience.”
She says music themed cruises are gaining in popularity, as are crafting cruises, sport-themed travel packages and yoga and wellness tours that combine a love of yoga with traditional yogi cultures to countries like Indonesia, India or Sri Lanka.
Scipione says her crafting cruises are usually more about the connections people make on the trip than the knitting or the destinations they travel to.
“I can tell you about six million stories of the friendships that have formed at our knitting sessions, especially amongst solos,” she says. “There was one lady who used to cruise with her husband before he died and now comes along to our craft cruises. She told me it actually saved her, and I believe her because we could see she was in a bad place when she came into the shop.”
As you might expect, the majority of the crafters are older ladies. But Scipione says young knitters are increasingly attracted to the concept with three generations, including a 10-year-old girl, joining them once.
Mat McLachlan combined his love of history with his family’s business in travel when he launched Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours in 2008. That first year the historian and author took 34 people on an ANZAC Day on the Western Front tour, in 2009, he took 50 and in 2010 it ballooned to 600 people.
“All our tours are led by expert historians who bring the history to life and share stories of the ANZACS, so no matter where your knowledge lies, our battlefield tours are designed to be an enriching experience,” says McLachlan who hosts military tours to France, Belgium, Gallipoli, Vietnam, Darwin and more.
cial interest travel incorporates food and wine. Celebrity chefs have long led tours exploring gastronomic centres of the world. Since the early noughties, French chef Gabriel Gate has led food tours of his homeland and now takes river cruisers through Southern France with Scenic. Vietnamese chef Luke Nguyen hosted several food trips on the Mekong River in Vietnam and Cambodia introducing travellers to local produce and then teaching them to cook with them.
Television host Maeve O’Meara launched Gourmet Safaris 25 years ago after she showed her mother’s group to her favourite Lebanese restaurant in Sydney. She started by leading walking tours around Sydney’s food villages, then to locations like Victoria’s High Country, South Australia and Tasmania. Demand led to O’Meara to take her food tours overseas to Sardinia and Corsica, the Greek Islands, Portugal and Spain.
“The visits to private homes and estates, both overseas and in Australia, and tapping in to local and regional seasonal food with guided trips through produce markets, cooking demonstrations and classes, there’s nothing like it,” O’Meara says.
Sharon Summerhayes is a cruise specialist and owner of Deluxe Travel and Cruise. She is the highest seller of the famous Rock the Boat music cruises who bring headline acts like Suzi Quatro, Jimmy Barnes and Daryl Braithwaite to the high seas. She says the cruises will charge about 30 per cent more than a standard cruise but for that you get rock shows each night and the chance to bump into the artists at the bar or poolside.
“They are so much fun, especially for single people,” Summerhayes says. “There is such camaraderie among the guests because they all have something in common. You can go to the bar by yourself and you will be guaranteed to find someone with the same music taste as you.
“And by the time you leave the ship, you’ll have 20 new friends.”
Briony Thomas, the cruise specialist who helps Scipione organise her crafting cruises, says she has been so inspired by the interest in themed cruises she wants to launch a true crime cruise.
“You need the niche, or theme, to be really specific or else it won’t work,” says Thomas, director of Tailored Travel & Cruise.
“I thought about doing a friendship cruise, but it’s too broad. Rather, a true crime cruise will bring like-minded people together and friendship will be the result anyway.”
From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
A divide has opened in the tech job market between those with artificial-intelligence skills and everyone else.
Brickworks has enlisted acclaimed architecture studio Kennedy Nolan to explore how homes could become more adaptable, energy-efficient and connected to community.
