Nice ship, poor experience

Our experience with Viking was terrible! We had previously taken a river cruise with Viking, and although there were problems with that trip we still decided to try them one more time. The second time was worse, far worse!

It began when Viking was two weeks late (beyond their on declared time line) in sending us our air reservations. I had to call to prompt them to send the reservations. The overseas flights that they arranged for us had terrible seat assignments and when I tried to change these seats with American Airlines I found that Viking had completely botched the reservations. The information for the couple that we were traveling with was switched with ours. After several hours on the phone with American they informed me that I would have to get Viking to straighten it out. Viking was resistant, claiming that it was American’s problem. After hours more on the phone with Viking I finally got them to cancel the air reservations and get us new reservations. The seat assignments were even worse but at least the personal info was correct so I could go out and pay up to get decent seats. All in all I spent approximately 10 hours on the phone with Viking and American in order to get our air reservations straightened out. I spoke to ten different Viking employees and almost all of them were unapologetic and resistant to helping. I had to get angry and demand to speak to a supervisor to even get help!

After all this, the ocean cruise was fairly nice except that the shore excursions were poorly chosen. We paid $100-200 for several excursions that took us to small, quaint villages that were largely closed up for the winter – no shops or restaurants to visit! All you could do was walk the empty streets.

Needless to say, we have traveled with Viking for the last time!