AmaWaterways Brand Guidelines: Amadeus Roots, the Ama Prefix & the Double-Width AmaMagna

Three founders and a raft on the Amazon.

AmaWaterways is a river cruise company based in Calabasas, California. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 2002 by Rudi Schreiner, Kristin Karst and Jimmy Murphy, under the name Amadeus Waterways, and that the company rebranded as AMA Waterways in 2008. The spelling used today runs the prefix and the word together, with capitals for the A and the W: AmaWaterways.

The company’s own “Our Story” page says it was “founded in 2002 by three families,” and that its river story began well before that. In 1975, it says, Schreiner, a Vienna-born student, went to South America on a journalism assignment and built a raft that carried him along the Amazon for seven months; the company calls that raft the first ship he designed. Its “About Us” page returns to the same image, describing founders “with a deep love for the rivers.”

The founders have told the story in the press as well. In a December 2022 interview with the travel writer Lea Lane for Forbes, marking the line’s twentieth anniversary, Schreiner and Karst were introduced as its co-founders. Schreiner described the appeal in plain terms: the ship arrives in town, passengers step off downtown, and they go to bed in one city and wake in the next. Karst gave the size of the ships at the time as 28 guests on the smallest vessels in Africa, about 150 on European rivers and 190 on the double-width AmaMagna.

The company says it remains “family-run and focused solely on river cruising.” Its leadership changed in 2025. English Wikipedia says Catherine Powell, a former Disney and Airbnb executive, joined as president in February 2025 and became chief executive on 1 July 2025, when Schreiner moved to chairman of the board; Karst moved from executive vice president to chief brand ambassador the same year. In November 2026 Travel Weekly, the London trade paper, quoted Powell as chief executive.

Ama, plus a word.

The ships carry the company’s prefix. English Wikipedia dates the first fully owned ship, the AmaDagio, to 2006, and the company calls it its first custom-built river cruise ship. Several later names join Ama to a musical word — AmaCello, AmaViola, AmaCerto — while others join it to a name, such as AmaKristina. English Wikipedia says the AmaCerto, launched in 2012, introduced 135-metre ships with “twin-balcony” staterooms; the all-suite AmaDara entered Mekong service in 2015; and the Rhine ship AmaKristina followed in 2017, with connecting and triple cabins for families travelling together.

The AmaMagna is the line’s outlier. The company says it is “twice the width of traditional river cruise ships” and that it made its debut on the Danube in 2019 with four dining venues; Schreiner told Forbes in 2022 that it had four restaurants, against two on the line’s other European ships. English Wikipedia says the fleet numbered 30 ships as of 2026.

The map widened with the fleet. English Wikipedia lists the Danube, Rhine, Seine, Douro, Moselle, Main, Garonne and Rhône in Europe, and the Magdalena, Mekong and Chobe beyond it; the company’s own river menu adds the Nile. In southern Africa the line sails the Zambezi Queen on the Chobe, a ship named both by Schreiner in Forbes in 2022 and by Travel Weekly in November 2026. English Wikipedia says the AmaMagdalena was launched on Colombia’s Magdalena River in April 2025, and Travel Weekly named the AmaDouro and AmaSintra as the line’s ships on Portugal’s Douro.

Partnerships shape the programme. English Wikipedia says Adventures by Disney began chartering AmaWaterways ships in 2015 for family sailings on the Danube and Rhine, and Schreiner named both Adventures by Disney and the cycling operator Backroads as partners in 2022. The company says it added bicycles on select ships in 2006 and began a wellness programme with dedicated hosts in Europe in 2017; Schreiner told Forbes that bicycles were carried on all its ships by 2022, with guided rides each week.

How river lines present themselves.

River cruise lines sell a particular kind of ship: long and low, sized for river locks, and built to moor at the edge of a town rather than at a port outside it. AmaWaterways’ co-founder Rudi Schreiner put the appeal plainly in a 2022 interview with Forbes: the ship arrives in town, passengers step off downtown, and they wake the next morning in another city. That idea runs through the way these companies present themselves, with the river and the town at its centre and the ship as the means of getting there.

The pictures follow the same order. Coverage of the lines often starts on deck: that Forbes interview opened with a picture of the sun deck of an AmaWaterways ship moored in Vienna, set with umbrellas, tables and chairs. Cabins are shown around the window. When Newsweek reported on the christening of an Avalon Waterways ship in Budapest in 2019, it singled out the panoramic balcony windows and generous cabins as the line’s signature.

Naming is the other constant, and it is usually systematic. AmaWaterways joins the prefix Ama to a word or a name, from the AmaDagio of 2006 to the double-width AmaMagna; Avalon pairs its own name with a single abstract word, such as Artistry, Panorama or Envision. Avalon names its new ships at public ceremonies led by a godmother, and English Wikipedia lists several of them.

Behind the ships sit corporate pages about founders and owners. Some lines tell a founder’s story — AmaWaterways traces its own to a raft on the Amazon in 1975 — while others present themselves through a parent group, as Avalon does through the Swiss Globus family of brands and its origins on Lake Lugano in 1928. This guide sets out what can be checked about each line: who founded it, who owns it, and how it names and pictures its fleet.

A prefix that names a fleet.

The clearest part of the identity is its naming system. The Ama prefix runs from the company name through the ships to its services: the website lists a myAmaCruise app and an AmaAir booking service beside the ships, and the AmaMagdalena takes the name of the Colombian river it sails. The website sorts its cruises by river first, from the Danube to the Magdalena, and then by interest — Christmas markets, wine, beer, music and golf among them.

The company writes about the rivers as the subject rather than the ships. English Wikipedia says the shore programme runs at three activity levels — gentle, regular and active — with bicycles carried on board, and lists multi-week itineraries such as a 14-night Grand Danube Cruise.

The founders’ own words follow the same line. Karst told Forbes in 2022 that a river cruise means “every day a sea day,” which she preferred to spell as a “see day,” and that rivers “physically take you through the country.” Schreiner named the Moselle, with its steep vineyards and small villages, and Portugal’s Douro as the two European rivers he held dearest.

For a design guide, AmaWaterways shows how a short prefix can hold a fleet, an app and a company together, and how a founding story about a raft can stand behind a modern fleet. Compare Avalon Waterways, launched by the Globus family in 2004, and Viking Cruises, another cruise line with a guide in this series. For this guide we use a deep river teal and a vineyard gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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