Travel
What Does the Rhine Have That the Mississippi Doesn't? Passengers
A decades-old law has helped stunt the U.S. river cruise industry, and operators are steamed. Here's their plan to put butts in seats.
Take a European riverboat cruise and you get a 13th-century cathedral, vineyards lining the Douro, steaming mulled wine at a frost-laden Christkindlmärkte. Steam down the Mississippi and you get small-town lore and Civil War sites.
What Huck Finn’s old stomping grounds can’t offer is the immense variety of options Europeans have developed over the past 20 years of river cruising. For many affluent travelers, towns like Alton, Ill., and Burlington, Iowa, just don’t have the curb appeal of a Vienna or a Budapest.