OneSixtyToOne

If you are flying from Toronto, myself and others have horror stories about that airport and Air Canada. I avoid both.

One more point. If you read your invoice, Viking states the air itinerary is selected about 150 days out. They ticket about 100 days out. You have between those two milestones to use MVJ to change your flights, cities, etc. After ticketing you can change things like seat assignments. As stated in another post, Viking is using contracted seats. These may not correlate to seat availability that you see when searching an airline’s website. They are essentially a different inventory of seats. Even if you pay Air Plus, if you want a different flight, there may be an up change because Viking may be purchasing those seats on the open market.

This has been covered extensively on this forum by @FlyerTalker and others. Airlines use placeholders for what they “think” their scheduled flights will be. Everything is subject to change. At 5 months out nothing is in stone. I am 100 days out from our next trip and just had an equipment change that altered our seat assignments. We also have had 2 schedule changes. On our last trip back from Europe, Lufthansa stop flying into our destination city on Sundays. This occurred while we were in the middle of a cruise about 10 days out from our return. It required an insane return route to get us home. Instead of a non-stop from Munich we had to go through Frankfurt and make connections in the U.S. This added 9 more hours to our travel. Viking doesn’t actually ticket and lock down your trip until about 100 days out. You and Viking are operating at the mercy of the airlines.

So you dock in San Diego on the 18th? Sounds like I have a photo op to take a picture of the ship. What excursions are you looking at? Pandas are expected to be back at the zoo later this year. Was just there last week. They are refurbishing the enclosure.

We toured The Alhambra with Viking and here are a few things to be aware of. It sells out within minutes. Be sure you try and book as soon as reservations open. Book and pay for it immediately. The Alhambra restricts the number of busses allowed by cruise lines to one single bus per day per line. Admission tickets must have the passenger's name printed on it. Because of this, even if there are cancellations onboard, the seats will not be resold. You are subject to random ID checks during the tour at checkpoints. You must carry your passport and the name must match what is printed on the ticket. It was an awesome experience that has to be seen to be believed. Celestial ceiling

Wonder why they scheduled this cruise with Malta on Christmas and Malaga on New Year’s Day? They now have scheduled them for sea days. Malta is a very Catholic country and I envision that everything will be closed on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve everything will shut down well before sunset.

I’ve been on MVJ extensively this week selecting excursions and checking the status of the sold out excursions multiple times a day and have never encountered “maintenance.” Are you sure you don’t have multiple browsers or connections to the website open simultaneously? This can cause your data to be locked.

The waitstaff serves you when you sit down. They are generous with the refill and people have been known to refill and then take their glass with them to other parts of the ship. If you have the SSP you are given a different glass so the staff knows what to refill.

Welcome to the Viking Ocean board where general questions and comments are posted. There is a separate area for roll calls for specific sailings. For better results and to reach people on your cruise, this request should be posted in the roll call for your sailing which you can find here:

Nordic Balconies are great!

No, unfortunately.

We were on the Santiago to Ushuaia leg last October and there were only 40 pax on the World Cruise. It not real high demand so any discounts you see will probably be going on for at least several months. Booking onboard your next cruise might give you the biggest incentive unless something else pops up first. Be aware of any current promo codes before you sail in July. The tour consultant might be unaware of all that is available. If you provide the code they can compare it with other available discounts. Since the World Cruise has a limited customer base, the legs of the cruise are heavily discounted from time to time. We got ours at about a 40% discount with free stateroom upgrade, free beverage package and free air included. It was a deal we couldn’t pass up. We booked about 10 months out. This is basically a repositioning cruise from the Arctic to the Austral summer. The main draw is the Antarctic leg, which may fill up by being sold as a separate sailing. Here is my writeup of our leg of the trip: https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/2968838-almost-live-viking-octantis-chilean-fjords-patagonia-explorer-october-17-30-2023/

Viking River’s Paris to Switzerland itinerary is now offering two new extensions that feature rail journeys. That now makes 3 Swiss rail extensions. It appears they are already moving in the direction of more land base options to feed into their various cruise itineraries.

This one in Buenos Aires? It’s right down the street from the hotel we stayed at on the Viking extension.

Yes, both port and starboard sides. Also the far port and starboard elevators are the only ones going to deck 6. There are also two out of the way elevators, one fore and aft. Fore is by the Explorer’s Lounge and will take you to The Hide. Aft will take you to the back of the World Cafe and down to the theater. i love this ship. Walking around is like an expedition in itself.