By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS
Los Angeles Times
Saturday, the Carnival ship Fascination sets sail from San Juan, Puerto Rico, on a seven-day Caribbean itinerary with about 2,000 passengers.
But when the moment comes for toasting at the first shipboard dinner, at least 350 of those cruisers will be lifting alcohol-free glasses.
Those will be the travelers recruited by Sober Vacations International, a Los Angeles company that specializes in trips for recovering alcoholics. The company, run by a pair of brothers who accompany every trip themselves, may not be a threat to enter the Fortune 500 any time soon. But theirs is not the only group serving this niche in the market.
Sober Vacations International, (818) 707-2111, organizer of the group on the Carnival ship, was founded in 1987 by Steve Abrams (a recovering alcoholic, sober now for 18 years) and brother Guy Grand (a recovering heroin addict, clean 12 years). They run four to six trips yearly and estimate that during the last 11 years, they've arranged 62 trips for about 10,000 customers.
Surveys show that about 15 percent of their customers come from California, another 15 percent from New York and 8 percent each from Illinois and New Jersey. Singles account for 51 percent; the rest are couples or families.
Those on the Caribbean cruise are paying $799 and up per person (double occupancy, excluding air fare). Aside from the usual shipboard activities and port calls, its sober travelers will get their own chunk of the main dining room, a space for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and a hospitality area with coffee and sodas.
This is not to say that the world teems with sober travel specialists. Frequently, Mr. Grand says, ''people start (running sober tours), and six months later, they realize this isn't so easy. And they drop it.''
The result is a fairly small marketplace. Another modest company that has endured is Celebrate Life Tours, (800) 825-4782, a Connecticut-based venture founded by Jack Wilbur in 1982. Mr. Wilbur said he also arranges about a dozen weekend trips on the East Coast yearly and three or four larger trips, usually dovetailing with AA conferences.
In Seattle, there's OSAT (One Step at a Time), (206) 236-9674, a sober outdoors club with the slogan ''Keep climbing mountains and don't slip.''
Now the group arranges retreats, trail work and climbs (20 to 30 events yearly) and stages AA meetings in Northwestern outdoor settings.
Another source on alcohol-free matters, of course, is Alcoholics Anonymous itself, which has a local phone number in every major U.S. city (www.aa.org) and yearly conventions. After the Minneapolis convention, on July 2, 2000, Sober Vacations International has chartered the Grand American Queen for a six-day cruise down the Mississippi to St. Louis. Cost is $1,590 and up per person, double occupancy. By Jan. 5, about 200 of 450 openings were full.
