Yoga cruises are available as exclusive ship charters, which is usually only possible on smaller more intimate ships. An example of this is the Windjammer Yoga Cruise along the beautiful coast of Maine that is usually scheduled at the end of August or beginning of September. On these kinds of yoga vacations, the ships become floating yoga hotels, with dawn meditation, yoga classes on secluded beaches, and drawing and journaling. There is evening music and nightly kirtan chanting—sometimes onboard ship and sometimes on the beaches of uninhabited islands. Norwegian Coastal Voyages has a yoga-dedicated itinerary timed to coincide with the mid-summer midnight sun. This cruise explores the magnificent fjords along the coast of Norway while cruising to the Arctic Circle.

More common are yoga cruises where an organization has blocked a number of cabins and reserved certain parts of the deck and/or function rooms for meditation and yoga exercise classes. These can occur on very large cruise ships sailing anywhere in the world, whether the itinerary visits islands in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. Cruise lines that cater to yoga groups in this way take great pains to keep the group's functions private. They will augment their vegetarian menus, as a substantial percentage of yoga practitioners are vegetarian. In some cases, there will be well-known guest yoga instructors booked onto these cruises, and often there will be special shore excursions booked just for the participants. In the Caribbean, there might be a shore excursion from Cozumel that visits one of the ancient Mayan ruins for a sunrise meditation. From Denpasar, on the Indonesia island of Bali there might be a shore excursion to the remarkable town of Ubud with its sacred monkey forest and temple.