Virgin Voyages Ship Denied Entry to Turkey, then Egypt, on LGBTQ+ Cruise
If you're booked on this Atlantis Events charter aboard Scarlet Lady's July 5 Athens-to-Venice sailing, your itinerary has changed: Kusadası, Istanbul, and Alexandria are off, replaced by Crete and Kotor, Montenegro. Check with Atlantis Events or Virgin Voyages directly for the updated port schedule and any timing changes before you travel. Roughly 1,100 of the 1,900 passengers aboard are from the US, so expect communications from the operator if you're on this specific sailing.
Two denials in one week on one sailing is the story here, and the irony is thick: Atlantis says it's chartered to Istanbul and Kusadası 13 times and to Egypt five times over 25 years without incident, then gets turned away from both within days. Turkey's Aydın province cited "moral standards" outright; Egypt gave no reason at all, denying entry four hours before the ship was set to dock in Alexandria—that's the detail that would worry me most as an operator, since an unexplained last-minute denial is harder to plan around than a stated policy. Virgin Voyages and Atlantis both frame this as isolated, but with Kotor now subbed in for Alexandria and Crete for the Turkish stops, my read is charter operators booking politically sensitive itineraries in this region need contingency ports built in from the start. If I were on this sailing, I'd treat the original itinerary as provisional until wheels-up.