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Wow Andy!!!! Thanks for that, a little better than my "back-of-the-napkin" estimate to say the least! I'm pleased that my schoolboy maths got to a figure that was somewhere in the ballpark, and that you've confirmed that there is likely to be more space per-passenger rather than less 😁 I believe I am correct in saying that there will be some increase in the floor area of all the public spaces, simply as a function of the increased beam and we still don't know exactly where the internal walls will be positioned within the volumes that you calculated. The improvement in pax/space ratio suggests to me that Viking have "done the right thing" by not squeezing in the absolute maximum number of additional cabins that the increase in overall tonnage (if that is the right term?) would allow. Might it not be reasonable to assuming that, by repositioning internal walls, all of the public spaces have also been enlarged in proportion to the number of additional passengers?

How did I miss that!!!! My only excuse is that I was reading on my phone, so the pages were a bit small 🔍😉 I must say you are making very good use of those lenses, I've always been a Canon fan. Of course, no hurry for the correction, enjoy your time in the land of chocolate and cheese 😁

I was wondering about that too. I am certainly no mathematician but I did a quick "back-of-a-napkin" calculation to roughly estimate if the new ships were likely to have any less space per passenger. To keep things simple (for the purposes of the calculation) I imagined that both the new and old ship designs were simple rectangles. Of course, this does not give a genuine real life figure for the space on either ship, but I believe it should give an indication if the deck area per passenger on the new ships is likely to be more or less than on the current ones. My calculation went as follows: Current fleet size 745x94 feet = 70030 square feet divided by 930 passengers = 75.3 square feet per passenger. New fleet size 784x101 feet = 79184 square feet divided by 998 passengers = 79.3 square feet per passenger. So, my extremely rough and ready estimate would suggest that if anything (even with the extra passengers) there is likely to be about 5% more space for each of us on the new ships, rather than less 😁 I hope my calculation makes sense and I have not missed something obvious. If anyone has a better way of making this estimation do let me know.

I've just been reading through your fantastic review of the Northern Lights trip on your website. I thoroughly enjoyed it and almost feel like I was right there with you. I was particularly impressed with the wide-angle interiors of the ship and your photographs of the entertainment are outstanding. I would be interested to know what equipment you're using? I don't know how often you update your website, but would like to suggest a small correction that you might like to make at some point? Folks reading your review of the Chef's table might be worried that they would not get the wine pairing unless they had purchased the beverage package. As you probably know that is not really the case and everyone gets a wine pairing, it is just upgraded for those with the package. I hope you forgive me for that small criticism of what is otherwise a really excellent review of your trip - I will now be happily working my way through the rest of your website 😁

Certainly is! Also I never thought of the ships being in "triplicate" before, but that makes perfect sense. Very much enjoying the thread as a whole, keep up the great work 👍 The deck plan for the new Vela is available on the Viking website. Both the main restaurant and the World Café are shown as being larger, though this might simply be in proportion to the additional number of passengers. You can find some more information on "Viking Vela" thread.

This article, originally posted by @FetaCheese mentions that that Viking Star will be going in for its 10 year drydock "soon" https://www.seatrade-cruise.com/refurb-interiors/after-more-100-viking-ships-rottet-studio-stays-engaged So I took a look at your spreadsheet and, sure enough, there is a gap of about a month in The Star's schedule for November 2024. This is not very soon, but I wonder if that explains the gap? The article also hints that there might be some interior refurbishment/restyling taking place while the ship is laid up. It will be interesting to see what Viking have planned.

@FetaCheese spotted this article and posted the link in another thread. https://www.seatrade-cruise.com/shipbuilding-refurb-equipment/10-more-viking-ocean-ships-2030-tad-bigger-and-some-china It gives the reason for the increase in size from The Vela onwards being that "the newbuilds will be a tad bigger due to new IMO stability regulations" I wonder if the Mariners on the board would like to comment on the stability difference between the current and new ships?

I like the new photo! In fact I chose the pronoun "they" because I was not sure if he or she would be appropriate. Now that you have confirmed that the person behind the detailed, comprehensive and well organised spreadsheet is a woman, that makes perfect sense. 👍 😁

Like @uktog I can confirm that TA benefits are available in the UK. Our usual practise is to check cabin availability and make a provisional booking with a UK phone agent who then contacts our TA. The TA then gets back to us for confirmation and billing. We have also had a booking made on board an ocean ship transferred over to our TA when we returned home. It is probably too late to do this with the bookings you have already made, but this is certainly something to think of for next time.

Some details of Viking's latest ship, the Vela, have now been revealed on their website. Here is a summary of what we know so far. The ship is 39 feet longer and 7 feet wider in the beam than the current fleet and will carry 68 more passengers. The deck plans suggest that most of the additional length results from changes to the rear section of the ship, with the addition of extra cabins and extensions to the main restaurant and world café. The extra width produces a small increase in the floor area of cabins. Previous reports have also indicated that the ship will have the capacity to use hydrogen propulsion in ecologically sensitive locations. The first sailing currently shown on the Viking website is the In Search of the Northern Lights itinerary leaving Tilbury on the 10th of January 2025, although cruises prior to this date may well be announced in due course. With thanks to @CharTrav and their amazing thread for the head's up on this news.

I agree it would be a good idea to call and check why the credit is not showing for you on MVJ. Here is what the payments & cart page looks like currently for me on MVJ when I click the payments method tab - I have not included the actual credit details but they are listed immediately below this part when I look at the page The amount per passenger is clearly indicated and also if it relates to a voucher which must be used before the sailing or is shipboard credit which can either be used in advance of the sailing, or once onboard. Hope that helps.

Funny you should say that. Our trip is to celebrate DW joining me in the world of the voluntarily unemployed 😁

They should be on there but not in an obvious place. From the menu, select "Payments and Cart" On the Payments and Cart page there are two tabs and it will open with "Cart" selected. If you click on the "Payment Method" tab, the details of your OBC should pop up. Hope that works for you 😁

Thanks @Romocruiser & @wine-wine-wine for the info. I just checked the samples of Puerto Madryn excursions listed for this cruise on VO's website and saw that there is an alternative to the Welsh tea tour, which is also flagged as being included - See below. I don't know if this is a mistake or if they are considering changing the included excursion or offering both, we shall see....... I also noticed that the Valparaíso included tour mentions a visit to the Fonck Museum which I don't recall seeing before, maybe I just overlooked it. We are doing this cruise then continuing across to Europe, so would be interested to know if Viking has previously offered an additional excursion for back-to-back passengers on changeover day?

Thanks for your brilliant trip report @Moonlion It is no criticism of yourself as you were just reporting the comment as "hearsay" but I can't help pointing out that it seems rather unfair to the tour vendors on the island and that it is probably not the whole truth. May I suggest that the problem was not the quality of the tour vendors but the quantity? The mainland of Orkney is a small island with a population of about 17,000 people. Even though the tourist industry is very important to the islands there are obviously only a limited number of people available that can provided tours. It may well have been the case that Viking could not contract enough high quality optional tours to service two ships on the same day, and therefore (perhaps in an attempt to be "fair" to customers on both ships?) decided not to contract any at all. From personal experience I know that Viking found enough good quality tour vendors when we visited the Orkneys with them on a midnight sun cruise. We were offered a range of optional tours and choose a cliff walk to Skara Brae, which was excellent. It is also worth noting that they currently indicate on their website that a range of optional tours will be available (See below) Again, this suggests to me that they are generally happy with the quality of local tour vendors and the issue had more to do with this being one of the rare occasions when they had two ships in Kirkwall on the same day. Glad you enjoyed your day on the island, nonetheless 🙂

Just an update of my experience in the last few days. I booked an upgrade to BA Club World through Viking via my TA and had them ask if they could sort seat assignments. The answer from Viking was no but that I could pay to select on BA.com once the flights were ticketed, which I did yesterday. What is interesting is that I did have to pay for seat selection on our outbound BA Club World flight but the seat selection was free for the BA Club world flight from Barcelona back to Heathrow. We are on a TA. Just another vagary of the cruise line contract system I expect 😕

If you are arriving independently at the port by taxi, it will probably drop you off in the underground section of the terminal. We decided to stay at a hotel nearby so we could walk into the port for embarkation. The entrance to the cruise terminal on foot was a bit tricky to find as it is in the middle of the shopping area, a couple of blocks back and at 90° to the Waterside. After asking for directions, we discovered it is on block D as I have shown using the red arrow on the map below. I completely agree with the comments from @milling73 We found Istanbul to be fascinating and an easy place to organise a pre-stay for ourselves. The port is about a 45 minute walk from the Hagia Sophia or 20 minutes via the safe and efficient public transport tram service. We walked to Topkapi Palace and on to the Hagia Sophia and had intended to get the tram for the return. However, we found wandering the local streets so interesting that we ended up walking all the way back to the port area, via the Spice Market, at the end of the day.

This is devastating news Andy. I'm sorry on two counts. Firstly this board will not be the same without your regular, carefully considered and well informed input. More importantly though, I am sad on a personal level to hear that the two of you have suffered a customer service experience so bad as to warrant your decision. In fairness I have to state that, in our own case, the UK office has dealt impeccably with any issues that have occurred. Nonetheless, all that I have read over the years suggests that pre and post cruise customer service (particularly in the USA) has been by far the weakest element in Viking's offering right from the start. It is undoubtedly true that people will allow a great deal of leeway to a company who, for the most part, does what they do well. However, as your decision shows, any company can only exploit goodwill from their customers to a limited extent. This is especially true in an area like cruising where our expenditure is completely discretionary. In addition to yourself, others on this board have expressed dissatisfaction with the customer service operation and this provides only a very small cross-section of Viking's customer base. It is virtually guaranteed that the negative experiences reported here can be multiplied out hundreds, if not thousands, of times across Viking's customer interactions as a whole. It seems clear to me that those involved in the on shore side of the business are doing a very great disservice to the personable and professional crew members who provide customers with such an excellent experience on the ships. This is not something that is sustainable for Viking in the longer term. I can only hope that your actions and those of others who decide to spend their leisure dollar elsewhere will bring this to the attention of senior management before it's too late.

You're very welcome..... I wish I got the ship name/ number right first time though 🙂

Thanks for that @Heidi13 I should have thought to list the ships myself before posting. Looking back at the reports from 2018 I now see that they were predicting that Tellus was to follow The Venus as "ship 8". With the help of yourself, and @LindaS272 I think I can now definitively say that it was the Viking Mars, which was provisionally called Tellus.......... Probably 😁

Excellent answer @Island2Dweller For independent travellers leaving the ship and making their own way directly to the airport it might be worth noting that there are Elizabeth line trains from Canary Wharf that continue beyond Paddington to Heathrow. Of course, the journey can also be reversed to travel from Heathrow to Greenwich Pier. There is a small surcharge included in the price when using the Elizabeth line to/from Heathrow, rather than the Piccadilly line. However that is usually good value as the journey is faster and the connections can be more convenient, depending on exactly where in London you're heading. Given that it is quicker and less costly than taxis and limo services, the Elizabeth line is IMO the best way between Heathrow and London. The one proviso is that you are able to wheel your bags up to 200 yards at a time over fairly level walkways and pavements......sidewalks? 🙂

Sorry - that would be right. In that case it was Neptune that would have been Tellus.

Back in 2018 it was widely reported that ship number eight (which has just gone into service as the Viking Saturn) would be called the Viking Tellus. This name is not (as some might expect 😉) a nod towards towards Viking customer services. In fact it is another name for the planet Earth 🌍 Tellus was the Roman counterpart of the Greek earth goddess Gaia. It is suggested that the word Tellus became used in Latin as a personification for the Earth as a whole rather than "terra" which related more to physical properties of earth, in the same way that "aqua" related to water. Hence the phrase "Tellus Mater" (literally Mother Earth) or simply "Tellus" became the name which was used for our planet by Latin speaking scholars into the renaissance and beyond. So, while the name was not applied to ship number eight as expected, it may come up again further down the line.

Viking's definition of "demanding" is not based only on the walking distance of the tour. Other factors are taken into account including that activities by foot may contain difficult unpaved surfaces and/or multiple stairs and steep inclines. It is unusual for the included tour to be described as demanding and so I checked the description of a similar Art Nouveau Walking Tour on the Seabourn website. They are much more specific in their description, noting that "this walking tour covers approximately 3 km and involves steps, uneven ground, cobblestone paths, gradual slopes and is therefore not suitable for guests with any walking difficulties" I think this suggests that Viking have correctly given a "demanding" rating (due to what may well be less than ideal walking surfaces in this historic town) rather than making a typo in the description.

In fact, there are three types of included wine available - red white and sparkling. The house sparkling wine is usually a dry German variety, normally the same one you might be offered on embarkation day or at the captain's reception etc. However, you can ask for it whenever the included wines are being served at any point on the voyage, For us it has become our standard sail-away drink and we sometimes take a glass to compliment a plate of sushi as an "opener" for our evening dining. 🙂🍾