Viking River Cruise – Part 2 – The Best Things
I talked last week about our first Viking River Cruise and will talk about all the best things about the cruise! The absolute best thing about the river cruise was the ability to visit so many cities in one week. On our cruise we visited Regensburg and Passau, Germany; Krems (Gottweig Abbey) and Vienna, Austria; and Budapest, Hungary. In all the cities (except Vienna), the river cruise docked right in the city, so it was an easy on/off to visit the city itself! Vienna was a much bigger city, so the boat docked farther away from the city center, but they did run regular shuttles the entire time we were docked there.
The Viking River Cruise also had many free included excursions and city tours to choose from. This was both a good and bad feature and I will talk about the bad next week. But on the good side, if you want to get a glimpse of the cities and see the highlights, the tours were a great way to do that, and all of the tour guides we had were amazing! Viking, because it is such a massive company in the river cruise business has a lot of local guides, who work almost exclusively for them. In addition, in many of the ports Viking even owns the motor coaches used for transportation. This pretty much ensures the level of service remains high no matter what you are doing.
On the boat itself, the entire cruise was adults only (no children under the age of 18 and a lot of people over the age of 60) and no casino. In the case of our cruise, it was 90% American passengers with a few Aussies thrown in to mix it up a bit. In addition, the communication was done via a printed schedule that was delivered to your cabin each evening for the next day! And every evening in the lounge you could attend an information session that gave you an outline of the next day’s activities. With only 180 guests on the ship – it’s a pretty intimate experience. The overall quality of Viking has been written, and video blogged a million times, so I will just say that the ship itself was a pillar of Scandinavian design. It was clean and well cared for and our cabin was amazing and always spotless for us.
I would also say that the food and service were very good. They had a really great menu that had some standards every day but also had specials that related to the cities we were docked in, giving you the ability to taste local cuisine while on the ship. It gave you a fantastic choice of food and no big buffets! This was the same setup for all three meals of the day. Some people who cruise on the ocean regularly, are used to 24/7 food access and this is not what happens on these river ships. There is a single seating for every meal, and it is all handled quickly and efficiently without being rushed.
The food service and bar staff, and all of the other staff on the ship could not have been better and since they are small “long ships”, you got to know those who were serving you and they got to know you, including your food preferences, which made for a great experience. Our server for breakfast every day learned quickly to leave off the berries on my husband’s plate and replace it with bacon. The executive staff, on our ship at least, were amazing, friendly and always ready to help. We never really wanted for anything.
As I mentioned previously, my husband was not exactly excited to take this cruise, but even he admits that the overall experience was good and that it wasn’t the terrible torture he was anticipating, for the most part (more to come on that.)
So, the positives were many and the experience memorable for all the right reasons. I may even be able to get my husband to do it again.
Next week I will cover what we didn’t like!
