Mich3554

I was told on embarkation day and the evening before disembarking that they let the dress codes slide. I know on the WC on embarkation day, a group of us were going into The Restaurant. One in the party had one jeans and went to go change. The receptionist told us they let it slide on these 2 days as they assumed people had not yet unpacked (or had packed for disembarking).

I do not believe Paxlovid is carried on board. When I got Covid on the WC, it wasn’t offered as treatment, and no one I knew who was in Covid jail received it either. I do know a few who brought it on board with them. All that was offered by the doctor onboard was OTC stuff for the symptoms. Since I was well stocked with cold meds, I turned them down as another visit (for a cold) resulted in a $25 charge for cough drops…..for the bag I left on the counter at home and forgot to pack! I would get it filled before boarding.

This past spring, the WC docked in Greenwich and we went into London for a show. We Ubered there and back, I think it was about 20£ each direction, took about 45 min. This was to and from the theater district. The only cruise where it was beneficial to use Viking transport was in 2021 to get to Santiago. It cost us $165 for private transport to our hotel there from Valparaiso. At the time, stuff was still shut down due to Covid still and our options weren’t great. (We also had a bunch of non refundable OBC to use). In 2019, I booked a private tour guide who took us from our hotel in Santiago on a wine tasting tour, a really good tour of Valparaiso and dropped us off at our ship for $100.

We were doing a back to back to back in 2021…..which was our warm up for the world cruise we had booked for 2022-23. We were in Colonia Uruguay when the sole started flapping on DH’s well worn Merrill hiking shoes. We were about 30 days into a 54 day cruise. Our next stop was Punta del Este, so we went shoe shopping with DH wearing his Tevas sandals (his only other pair of shoes). We also went hunting for shoe glue to glue them back together. Got back to the cabin and went to repair the shoes, but they had disappeared. Turned out our cabin attendant took them and got both shoes repaired. You couldn’t even tell that they had fallen apart.

This has been my experience…..3x since Covid. I have pretty much stopped using Viking air to book because of it. If I am going to have to do the legwork (and since we always deviate, I’m not looking for ground transport), the only benefit is cost, and usually have done much, much better than Viking for cost. When I have to go online, find alternatives and contact Viking to rebook them….in the proper class…..then what’s the advantage?

So you are flying within the US, business class? That’s not the problem being discussed. If you book a business class in the US to another US city, this doesn’t seem to be a problem. The issue about business class seats is when you are flying overseas and booking (and paying for) business class. Viking tends to book ‘mixed class’ seats overseas where the overseas portion is business, but will book you in economy seats to fly from the west coast to the hub for the international flight. Almost half my flight distance for an overseas flight is in economy, and that’s not what I paid for. My experience is much like @CCWineLoverso after dealing with this so frequently, we just don’t try anymore and book ourselves.

We were on an ATV tour in Isafjordur where the guide recognized DH’s interest in photography, so made our ATV tour visiting various different landscapes. He was pretty good about making sure that DH was welcome to stop when he saw something that interested him to take pics as long as he wanted, without rushing him. This was a private tour though, but the guide was one we had been introduced to previously through a Viking excursion.

Interesting. We were out in Puget Sound on a dinner cruise a few years ago when a pod of humpback whales was seen. The Dungeness crab dinner was quickly forgotten while we all went out on deck to watch the whales. Locally, ships are not allowed to get within a certain distance of whales, and the whales were continually getting closer to the boat we were on, so we had to keep backing away to keep the legal distance, rather than getting closer. 20-40 yards was too close, so wonder if this is restriction is only for the local area or a worldwide standard? We saw more whale activity on that dinner cruise than in the 3 whale watching trips I’ve taken visiting guests out on…..combined.

The only reason why we started with Viking, even though I was hooked on the idea of cruising was (1) the Oceania cruise we were interested in was fully booked, the sales rep laughed at me and never got back to me with a quote on another cruise and (2) when I called Viking, the sales rep was willing to dig through inventory to let me know what cruises were available for the time we wanted (in about 3 months). There was a room available on a trans Atlantic, so we booked it. There was almost immediate payment required (I think I had 24 hours) but their sales staff were far more responsive. It’s amazing how a single customer service rep being willing to go the extra mile for a newbie wound up getting about $250k of business sent their way over the last 5 years. I have stuck with the same rep.

We were told they weren’t allowed, so didn’t use them. There was a long laundry list of what you could not include in their shipment, and we followed it to the letter. We did use Air Tags in the luggage that we brought with us on the flight.

No children or casino sold us on Viking. I think only Virgin has no kids, but the ships I have seen they are much larger, and that has little appeal. I have looked at Regents, but haven’t pulled the trigger on one yet.

Luggage Forward doesn’t allow these items to be shipped, it’s not Dubai. We shipped luggage for our world cruise, both to the ship and home. Medicines (including OTC), toiletries, vitamins, spices, electronics and a bunch of other things were not allowed to be shipped. Those items, under 100 ml are allowed in carry on luggage in Dubai. They are allowed in checked luggage in larger quantities. I have flown through Dubai several times with all of these.

This is the nice thing about Viking, you can be as busy as you want to be. We adore sea days, but on the WC there were people griping that there were too many sea days and they were bored (I did wonder if they bothered to look at the itinerary). If you think you are going to be bored, then don’t do a TA, or any cruise with a lot of sea days, If you don’t like sea days, find a cruise that’s in a different port each day. There are a lot of them. If you do like sea days, find a different cruise that has more of a balance.

We actually got an accounting of our alcohol use on the world cruise, since they kept track of it. Viking made money off of us, as we did not drink 1/2 of what the package would have cost us had we paid fo4 it a la carte.

Agreed! He even has a tie he wears to match his lectures!

Yeah, I know. Same with the included Silver Spirit package, generous OBC and included gratuities.

Yep. I have had to pay a lot of attention to flights Viking offers. It’s enough of a hassle in that it needs to be a really good price break (like free business class for the WC) for me to consider it, and deal with the hassles of making changes.

We are booked on this cruise this coming Jan, going Bergen to London. We have been in Bergen several times, London not so much. While I’ve scheduled us to fly in a few days early, I scheduled much more time in London. I’d rather get the more complicated flights over early. our flight home was direct, but the airline now has us connecting in MSP. Not so happy with that as that gives us a 4 pm arrival in SEA, which means we are going to have to deal with traffic. Our original flight had us landing at noon. Our cabin is on the starboard side.

My kryptonite is the Living Room Bar’s almond croissants. DH also felt like the plain croissants were better there than in WC.

This is probably a smart move. We used Airalo on our world cruise this year. DH chose the global plan (which unfortunately did not include voice or text). I decided to buy plans by the country. First purchase was New Zealand. Worked beautifully, and I had an idea of how much data I’d be using. Next stop, Australia. We fought for half the time we were in Australia to get m6 plan going. After that, I decided to go with the global plan. Apparently, if you have more than one eSIM plan in function…..even if you are no longer in the country but still hav3 time on it….it jacks everything up. Once I finally got the global plan working in Indonesia, everything worked great and it was very easy to top off.

Viking booked us Seattle to NYC in coach, NYC to AMS in business class. The direct flight would have cost us $1500 pp more, I compromised and got us business class seats across the US for *only* $500 more than our quoted business class fare (it turned out not to be a deal). This was for a river cruise we took 7 months before getting onto the WC. Interestingly enough, when I booked our flights for the WC, I didn’t have near the battle getting business class seats all the way. These are the only times we have flown Viking air. When I booked those fares, I was warned that the direct flights I wanted would come with a surcharge. When I mentioned it was for the WC, there was some backpedaling.

I have a set of Leki poles which I bought at REI. I had another set, but they did not collapse short enough to fit into my carry on bag. What I did was put them in my backpack, with the handles sticking out. This worked ok for several trips, until they got confiscated by TSA (I knew it was a risk). Luckily, they were not an expensive set, but I liked them.

You do not have to buy the SS package to get something other than the house wine to drink at dinner. If you don’t like it, you can buy a glass (very reasonably priced) of whatever you want. We do this all the time. Usually we will find a wine from the wine menu, and drink it at dinner instead of the free offerings.

We took about $300 in cash, a lot of smaller bills. The rest of the time, we just hit an ATM when we got into port. In every country we hit (that we were staying more than a day), either DH or I took out the equivalent of about $100. We split the cash, between us. Every ATM we used, there were no huge conversion costs or foreign fees. If an ATM charged us, it got refunded. The costs were very comparable to what the current exchange rate was. The last stop in that country, we tried to use up cash and we’re only left with coins at the end. As DH went scuba diving a lot of places, that did a good job of getting rid of cash.

The last time I paid for our cruise, DH told me the money was in his account so I could pay it. I did that day. 3 days later, the money was still in his account so I went online to see what was going on. The cruise was marked paid in full and I had no balance due. I still had a week left to make the final payment, so decided it give it a few days. A day or so later, DH’s account was finally debited. I got a float from Viking I wasn’t expecting.