Amy Lynn Bradley went on a cruise with her family to what seemed like a tropical paradise, and never came back.
Amy disappeared from a Royal Caribbean ship on March 24, 1998, in Curaçao, and has been missing ever since.
The 23-year-old had been dancing at the Rhapsody of the Seas nightclub with her brother, Brad, as well as other passengers, crew members and members of the ship’s house band. In the early hours of the morning, she and Brad both returned to their family’s suite. Her father, Ron, saw her sleeping on the cabin’s balcony, but about half an hour later, she was gone.
“Myself and my parents have had to endure a lot of sadness, but the last thing that I ever said to Amy was, ‘I love you,’ before I went to sleep that night,” Brad said in a video released by the FBI. “Knowing that’s the last thing I said to her has always been very comforting to me.”
Since her disappearance, there have been several alleged sightings of Amy, though none have been definitively confirmed. The Netflix documentary Amy Bradley Is Missing premiered on July 16 and revisited the long-unresolved case, offering more insight into what could have happened to the recent college graduate.
Here is everything to know about the day Amy Lynn Bradley went missing and what authorities and her family think happened to her.
Amy was born May 12, 1974, in Petersburg, Virginia. After high school, she attended Longwood University on a basketball scholarship.
Her love of the sport was reflected in her body art. According to the FBI, Amy has distinctive tattoos: A Tasmanian devil spinning a basketball on her shoulder, an illustration of the sun on her lower back, a Chinese symbol on her right ankle and a gecko on her navel. The FBI also noted that her belly button was pierced.
Amy’s mother, Iva, revealed on Vanished that Amy was nervous about going on the cruise, which her father’s company paid for.
“She was a little apprehensive about the big boat thing, and about the ocean,” Iva said. “Even though she was a swim team coach and swam all her life.”
How old was Amy Lynn Bradley when she disappeared?
Amy had also reportedly lined up her first full-time job at a computer consulting firm. Iva noted in a blog for International Cruise Victims that Amy had recently adopted a bulldog, whom she planned on picking up upon their return home from their cruise, and also had a new apartment.
“She had so many plans,” Iva wrote. “And she was so happy about all of them.”
Amy was last seen in the early hours of March 24, 1998, on the Royal Caribbean Rhapsody of the Seas cruise ship, which was sailing from Oranjestad, Aruba, to Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles.
She and her brother Brad went dancing at the ship’s nightclub before they returned to their family’s suite, per The New York Times. Brad reportedly returned at 3:35 a.m. and Amy about five minutes later, after which they sat together on the balcony talking. Brad then went inside to sleep, while Amy stayed on the balcony in a lounge chair.
“She said she was going to stay out on the balcony and get some fresh air,” Brad recalled on Vanished. “So I told her I loved her and went inside.”
Amy’s father, Ron, said he saw Amy sleeping on the balcony of their cabin between 5:15 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. When he looked again around 6 a.m., she was gone and had only taken her lighter and cigarettes with her, even leaving her shoes behind.
Ron said that at first, he thought Amy might have gone on deck to take photos or have coffee, but when he didn’t see her on the deck, he searched the ship for more than an hour. When Amy didn’t turn up, he became nervous and woke Iva to tell her that their daughter was missing.
“When we discovered Amy missing, we begged the ship’s personnel to not put the gangway down, to not allow anybody to leave the ship,” Iva told NBC News in 2005. “And we told them that if Amy had left the room for any more than 15 minutes, she would have left us a note. And they put the gangway down anyway. People left the ship in Curaçao.”
The captain of the ship reportedly agreed to help search for Amy, but allegedly refused to seal off the ship or make any announcements about her disappearance for fear of panicking other passengers.
The Bradleys met with the captain around 5 p.m., and he told them that his search hadn’t turned up any sign of Amy. After docking in Curaçao, the ship made its regularly scheduled stops and returned to Puerto Rico on schedule. Following a four-day investigation by Dutch authorities, Royal Caribbean chartered its own boat for an additional search but also came up empty, per the Associated Press.
In 1999, after the Bradleys sued Royal Caribbean for what they alleged was negligence, defamation and intentional emotional damage, the cruise line issued a statement, saying they acted “appropriately and responsibly at all times.”
“We’re sorry despite all these efforts to assist the Bradley family they’ve apparently decided to direct their grief at the company by filing a lawsuit seeking financial damages,” the company said, adding that the FBI administered polygraph tests to certain crew members. A judge threw out the case in the fall of 2000, per Travel Weekly.
What happened between Amy Lynn Bradley and Alister ‘Yellow’ Douglas?
While at the nightclub with her brother, Amy hung out with Alister “Yellow” Douglas, a member of the ship’s live band, Blue Orchid, and had drinks with the group, per CNN. Douglas said that they danced together briefly and that she was smoking a lot of cigarettes at the time.
“I grew up in Grenada, and growing up in Grenada, you hardly ever see people smoke,” he recalled in an October 2024 interview. Douglas asked Amy why she was smoking so much and said he was stunned by her reply: The musician claimed that she told him her father was “an insurance manager or something like that, and that he found out that she’s gay, and he forced her to come on the cruise.”
Douglas said they parted ways around 1 a.m., when he, as a staff member, had to exit the ship’s passenger area.
NBC News reported that two women on the cruise reported seeing Amy with a musician from the ship’s band at 6 a.m. riding the elevator to the ship’s top deck, while Iva recalled on Vanished that two college girls told her they saw Amy at 5:45 a.m. heading to the ship’s 24-hour dance club with Douglas.
The musician previously recalled to CNN that a cruise line manager knocked on the door of his room at 6 a.m., asking if Amy was with him. He said no, and said that investigators searched his and his bandmates’ rooms and found nothing suspicious and no sign of Amy.
Brad recalled on Vanished that he had an awkward encounter with Douglas the morning that Amy disappeared.
“He comes up to me, and the first thing he said was, ‘Hey man, I’m sorry to hear about your sister,’ ” Brad claimed. At the time, only the captain and the family reportedly knew that Amy was missing. Ship security and the FBI questioned Douglas, but found no evidence that he was involved with Amy’s disappearance.
Since her disappearance, several individuals have claimed to see Amy.
In April 1998, Ron and Brad returned to Curaçao to search for Amy with the aid of police. A local cab driver said he recognized Amy from a flyer and told Ron and Brad that she had approached him minutes after the ship docked, frantically looking for a phone. Brad said that days later, he heard Amy call his name from a passing van.
“I heard Amy call my name, pretty distinctive all my life, the way she would say my name and call me,” he said on Vanished. They began following the van, but Amy wasn’t inside.
A Canadian tourist named David Carmichael was scuba diving in Curaçao in August 1998 when he believes he spotted Amy “flanked by two people” on the beach. He didn’t pay any mind to the group at first until Amy tried to get his attention.
“The minute she heard I spoke English, she picked up her pace and was putting distance between her and the two people who were flanking her,” Carmichael recalled on Vanished, adding that within seconds, she was only about three to four feet from him. Just as she was about to speak, Carmichael alleged, the men pulled Amy into a restaurant.
Carmichael followed them, noticing a scar on Amy’s right shin and that she was pointing to her tattoos, which matched all of Amy’s.
“I was two feet away from her, two feet. That’s how close I was,” he claimed. “I don’t even have to think about it. It’s 100%—not even 99%, it’s 100%. It was her.”
Authorities searched the area after getting Carmichael’s tip, but didn’t find any sign of Amy.
In January 1999, a Navy petty officer reportedly visited a brothel in Curaçao and said a woman told him her name was Amy Bradley and asked him for help. He told her there was a naval ship about five minutes away, but she responded, “No, you don’t understand. Please help me. My name is Amy Bradley.”
The officer didn’t take action, Ron told NBC News, in part because the officer wasn’t allowed to be in the brothel and because he didn’t know anyone by that name was missing until he saw a magazine cover with Amy’s face and name on it.
Ron and Iva also told CNN that there was another alleged sighting of Amy in a department store bathroom in Barbados in 2005.
When Amy first went missing, the ship’s captain suggested that she may have fallen overboard, but her family was skeptical because they’d never seen her approach any of the railings on the ship. Some crew members suggested she may have jumped overboard and died by suicide, but her family also raised doubts about that theory.
“Knowing the type of person that she is, and the fact that she just graduated from college, just gotten a new English bulldog, which she had always wanted—as far as jumping from the ship, [it] just never [had] been a possibility in my mind,” Brad said.
Another crew member suggested that Amy may have disembarked and might be on the island, so her family began looking for her in Curaçao. The Bradleys got in touch with the FBI, but it would’ve taken agents at least 24 hours to get to Curaçao, and the ship was scheduled to leave the island within four hours, so Ron, Iva and Brad stayed behind after the ship departed.
FBI agents then told Iva and Ron that they’d been in contact with the ship’s crew and claimed that the captain’s search hadn’t been as thorough as they’d thought.
“They searched the common areas, they searched the restrooms, but they did not search every nook and cranny,” Iva claimed on Vanished. They caught up to the ship at its next stop in St. Thomas, where Iva confronted the captain and urged him to let the FBI search the ship.
On March 26, 1998, the FBI searched the ship extensively and had crew members carry a photo of Amy to ask passengers about her whereabouts. Amy’s parents have said that they believe she may be a victim of human trafficking.
“My intuition as a mother is somebody’s got her,” Iva said on Vanished. “Somebody saw her, somebody wanted her and somebody took her.”
In September 2005, an anonymous source allegedly sent the Bradleys photos of a woman whom they claimed was Amy that they found online. In the photos, the woman’s hair is longer and her makeup is styled differently than Amy’s was when she disappeared, but Iva believed it could have been her daughter.
The photos, in which the woman was named “Jas,” were reportedly from an adult website based in the Caribbean. The Bradleys had a forensic detective analyze the photos, who allegedly said it was a perfect match for Amy. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to pinpoint the site’s IP address, and the FBI still lacks evidence to detain or charge anyone with kidnapping.
More than 140 people on a Royal Caribbean cruise suffered with the mystery illness, with passengers and crew experiencing vomiting, cramps and diarrhoea onboard Navigator of the Seas
Royal Caribbean’s Navigator of the Seas cruise ship(Image: Getty Images)
A luxury cruise turned into a nightmare after a mystery illness impacted more than 140 people. A total of 134 passengers and seven crew members onboard the Royal Caribbean ship Navigator of the Seas reported grim symptoms including stomach cramps, diarrhoea and vomiting, according to the US-based Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
It is not clear what caused the outbreak on the cruise, which took passengers from Los Angeles in the US to Mexico and ended on July 11. The CDC said extra cleaning measures had been put in place by Royal Caribbean and those affected had been isolated.
“The health and safety of our guests, crew, and the communities we visit are our top priority,” a spokesperson for parent company Royal Caribbean Group told USA Today. “To maintain an environment that supports the highest levels of health and safety onboard our ships, we implement rigorous cleaning procedures, many of which far exceed public health guidelines.”
‘We implement rigorous cleaning procedures,’ said Royal Caribbean(Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
So far in 2025, 18 gastrointestinal illness outbreaks on cruise ships have reached a CDC threshold for public notification. There were 18 in the whole of 2024 and 14 in 2023.
Most cases are linked to norovirus, which can cause diarrhoea, vomiting, body aches including stomach pains, a headache and high temperature. It usually gets better in around two to three days.
Both passengers and crew experienced symptoms(Image: sbw-photo)
This comes after an industry expert said small ship cruise lines may stop putting close-up images of polar bears in brochures because of new restrictions in Norway.
Akvile Marozaite, chief executive of UK-based global representative body Expedition Cruise Network, said limits on how close ships can get to the animals means the sector must change “how we communicate” with travellers.
Polar bears are a key draw for people embarking on sailings to Norwegian-ruled archipelago Svalbard, as they can be observed in their natural Arctic habit.
But concerns about interference from humans means the government has banned ships in the region from being closer than 500 metres from the animals.
Ms Marozaite said the sector is partly paying the price for “always talking about polar bears” in relation to Svalbard trips.
She told the PA news agency: “Of course they are something that people want to see, but expedition cruising to Svalbard is actually an incredible opportunity to experience a lot of other things about the destination.There is incredible human history, beautiful scenery, other species of wildlife.”
Ms Marozaite said cruise lines are continuing to show their guests polar bears, some by sailing closer to Greenland. The impact of Norway’s distance rule is “more to do with how we communicate”, she said.
“The communication around Arctic voyages is going to change. Companies hopefully will no longer be putting close-up images of polar bears on the brochure.
“That’s a good thing, because finally we will start talking about the destination the way it should be talked about.” But expedition leader and photographer Paul Goldstein criticised the new regulations.
He told The Independent’s travel podcast: “This is a classic example of what I term ‘conservation fascism’. I have led small ship charters in the region since 2004.
“Never once have I seen a single incident where tourists intimidate or affect the behaviour of polar bears.” He added that if a camera lens “the size of a Stinger missile” is required to see polar bears then most visitors will miss out.
Norway’s minister of climate and environment Andreas Bjelland Erikse previously said the rules are necessary as climate change is “leading to more difficult conditions for polar bears on Svalbard”.
He went on: “It is important for them to be able to search for food, hunt, rest and take care of their cubs without interference from humans.
“That is why we must keep a good distance.” The minimum distance will be reduced to 300 metres from July 1.
The Norwegian government said visitors to Svalbard have “a duty to retreat to a legal distance” if they encounter a polar bear that is too close. Ships are also banned from carrying more than 200 passengers in the region.
Home»CRUISE NEWS» Now, ASTA River Cruise Expo 2026 Expands: More Ships, More Learning in Amsterdam, here’s What You Need to Know
Friday, July 18, 2025
The American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA) is pleased to announce an expanded River Cruise Expo March 11-15, 2026 in Amsterdam. The event that was initially so popular it was sold out as early as April, is so successful that ASTA has had to secure extra docking spaces. That’s a good step since it allows more venues and boats that can participate in making the expo enjoyable.
Additional Docking Space Boosts Attendance
The business development team at ASTA has worked hard to secure additional dock space, and registration for travel advisors and other industry professionals has reopened. This preemptive measure should lead to better show participation, and a broader network for those involved on both sides of the business. The capital of the Netherlands, with its intricate waterways and easy to navigate tourist infrastructure, is a perfect city to host the bigger competition.
There will be cruise ships from 15 lines at the exposition
No less than fifteen river cruise vessels will be exhibited at the ASTA gathering in 2026. The event delivers in-depth insight into the newest industry technologies and onboard product innovations. The addition of two ships reflects ASTA’s dedication to growing a variety of new cruising options that agents can sell to their clients.
Celebrity to Offer River Cruises Celebrity Cruises and Trafalgar Will Offer River Cruises
A special feature of the expo will be the launch of the first-ever river products on the local market by Celebrity River Cruises and Trafalgar Tours. With this in mind, the following leading brands will launch services and features, offering brides-to-be a first look and chance to try before anyone else! The two companies’ offerings reflect the expansion of the river cruising sector and have taken interest from the established ocean cruise lines and tour operators.
Celebrity River Cruises is expected to bring the luxury that is synonymous with ocean cruising to the rivers of Europe and around the world. Another company known for its immersive land tours, Trafalgar, will demonstrate its distinctive take on river cruising, which combines cultural depth with home-away-from-home comfort and convenience.
Longer General Sessions Create Learning Opportunities
Another big change for the 2026 River Cruise Expo is expanding the general session from one day to two. The new expanded format is designed to enhance educational value greatly, according to ASTA. Attendees will have additional time to interact with industry leaders, listen to thought-provoking panels, and also network on a larger scale.
Keynote Speaker Inspiration from Elizabeth Gilbert
Keynote speaker Elizabeth Gilbert, best-selling author of the inspirational Eat, Pray, Love, will make her SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo debut and kick off the event. Gilbert’s captivating narrative is sure to strike the right chord with travel advisors, providing inspiration, motivation, and never-before-heard sentiment on the transformative power of travel. Her attendance serves to reinforce ASTA’s commitment to providing unforgettable, immersive experiences.
AmaSofia’s Godmother Named: Sarah Little
Sarah Little, ASTA’s senior vice president of business development, will serve as godmother of AmaWaterways’ new AmaSofia. The ceremonial acknowledgment honors Little’s significant achievements within the travel industry and recognizes her commitment to river cruising. The naming is one of the most treasured traditions to represent the formal commencement of a ship’s life and service to her country.
Showcase Networking and Sneak Peeks for the Audience
River Cruise Expo claims to provide networking opportunities for travel advisors, cruise lines, and industry partners. Delegates will receive exclusive previews of new ships and once-in-a-lifetime onboard experiences to allow them to make knowledgeable recommendations to their clients. Advisors appreciate the opportunity to stay ahead of industry trends and changing client needs.
Amsterdam: An Ideal Host City
With Amsterdam’s classic spider web of canals and seafaring tradition, it’s not a surprise the city hosts ASTA’s function. Delegates will have the exciting opportunity to experience the hustle and bustle of this internationally renowned city, visiting historical sites, museums, and enjoying great food. The city of Amsterdam easily facilitates conferences and events of this size, making it easy and enjoyable for international visitors.
Industry Impacts and Future Prospects
With river cruising increasingly becoming a standout favorite among travelers for their smaller, less chaotic, and more culturally focused travel experience, the added dimension of the ASTA River Cruise Expo is timely. Where industry trends and insights are shared and new partnerships are forged and developed, ATM is where the global building and construction community comes together to drive towards sustainable success.
ASTA’s proactive growth is a further testament to the leadership of the travel industry and the standards by which the world travels. This year is set to be game-changing and will further solidify Amsterdam on the map as a top destination for river cruise events.
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