Disappointing Viking
Viking Legend Cruise Review to River Cruises - Europe
Contributor Level:
Deck Hand
Cruises: 2-3 cruises
Review: 1
Helpful Votes: 63
7 Night Danube Waltz Eastbound (Passau To Budapest)
Sail date: July 29, 2018
Ship: Viking Legend
Cabin type: Oceanview
Cabin number: 222
Traveled as: Couple
Reviewed: 6 years ago
Review summary
The Viking experience is rather slow and not for those looking for even a lot of active walking. The lack of providing times, months in advance of departure, for entering and leaving each port make it impossible to plan your own shore excursions. Viking's Included shore excursions are very light and not informative. They are drive-by/walk-by tours never going inside of anywhere to do something in depth. The QuietVox technology for the tours, however, was outstanding and should be adapted by every cruise company. Overall the guides are not very good. They try to be comedians but aren't funny. Several guides told us over and over again that they didn't want to tell us too much information so that we wouldn't be confused; consequently we didn't get much information. The paid for tour of Schonbrunn Palace (Vienna) is rushed leaving you no time in the very complex, high baroque style rooms to observe the detail, and then hardly any time to look at the gardens or anything else. It's better to go on your own, get the audioguide and take your time; and the cost is a fraction. It's easy enough to do. Also, Vienna should be a 2 day stop as there is so much to do there. The wine tasting tour to Morwald Winery, on the other hand, is very worth the money and terrific fun. The Passau organ concert was a nice touch. It would have been nice for Viking to have provided lists of other concerts and things to do on your own if you wished to pursue them. The slow pace and the light information might be great for some but not for us. I have to say that every other guest on the cruise with whom we spoke was not going to take another Viking cruise because of these 2 aforementioned reasons. However, the greatest flaw was Viking's lack of honesty about what really happened at the end of the cruise, not announcing the loss of air conditioning, not apologizing for it and not explaining anything.Embarkation
Unlike other cruise lines we've been on, Viking does not publish in advance of sailing the time of arrival and departure for each port. Neither do they give you an idea of what will happen the day you first arrive for embarkation thus it is hard to plan and coordinate with other people, which is what we wanted to do. Turned out the practice drill was the second day and was more of a pro forma joke than any clear instruction about what would happen in case of an emergency. We did put our floating vests on and gather at our stations and that was it.
Ship experiences
Food and Dining
Overall food was fine but way to heavy with sauces and not cognizant of health. Breakfast and lunch did offer very good choices but dinner rarely. The night docked in Vienna was certainly fun with musicians and special foods. Here it was reasonable for the food to be heavy although there were a lot of nicely prepared vegetables on offer despite the heavy meat dishes.
Onboard Activities
The narration provided for the trip through the Wachau Valley was good. The professor's history presented the night docked in Vienna was excellent. Otherwise the Program Director, Cornelia, had to play actress, historian, etc. Cornelia tried very hard but she is not a scholar nor a great actress and had too much other work coordinating tours, etc. to prepare well to entertain and lecture the guests. We should have had good lecturers daily with a lot of historical, social, political, etc. information.
Entertainment
Service and Staff
The cabin steward and the dining servers were all excellent: friendly, helpful, accommodating and went out of their way to make the trip very comfortable and enjoyable. Laundry, for example, came back within 2 hours. The managerial staff on the other hand greatly flawed at the end of our cruise. Clearly the ship was breaking down in some way and they never announced the problem, recognized the problem or explained the problem. They just made it seem as though there was nothing wrong. However, our cruise ended a day early, we had no airconditioning for the last 16 hours, the boat oddly sped up and slowed down in curious ways on that last day and all that was said to us is that the Danube water level was too low for the ship to pass. This seems unlikely given the number of other ships that passed and that there was no honest announcement about the ship's peculiar manner.
Ship Quality
Cleanliness is 5 stars. The ship design is less but I don't want to fault the cleanliness as it is so important in your cabin, on deck and in the kitchen and they all get flying colors.
Cabin / Stateroom
Comfortable and quiet. Other cabins, closer to the back of the boat, are noisy. The bathroom is particularly well designed given the very tiny space.
2 Comments
IkeDeb 6 years ago
SammyAddison 6 years ago