Mich3554

The SS package is only the way you pay for alcohol. It does not give you any advantage of receiving something that a passenger without the package can’t pay for. Wines that are sold by the bottle are not given by the glass for those with the SSP. The wines available vary. Usually, a red and white are offered at dinner. Yes, you can request another glass of wine if you do not like those offered at dinner and pay for them without the SSP. We do this all the time. We also make liberal use of any vineyard visit on the cruise and bring bottles we like back on board with us. After our world cruise, it was a scramble to finish up the wine we bought before we got off the ship. All our spare luggage space was taken up by the 8 bottles of single malt scotch DH bought in Scotland afterwards.

We were on the Neptune world cruise this year and this is how it worked. I’d assume it will be the same for the coming WC. You will receive the credit in 2 chunks. The first chunk, you can use for excursions before you get on the ship. We used all that up, and more which went on a credit card. When we got onboard, we had another chunk of credit available to us. If you want to add excursions, you can use that then but not before. Viking keeps track of which excursions are paid with OBC (non refundable credit) and your credit card (refundable). When you charge things to your account, non refundable (which is also that second chunk of credit you get when you board) gets used up first. It does make sense. Non refundable credit is a ‘use it or lose it’ thing, refundable credit gets refunded to you, so it’s important to know what you have of each. They will tell you when you get credited on the TV as to whether the credit is refundable or not. Another thing they allowed was that when we reached London, we were allowed to use some remaining credit to use Luggage Forward to send things home. As we were continuing on to NYC, we used that chance to send home most of the summer shoes and clothing and DH’s scuba stuff since he wasn’t going to use it. Viking also allowed us to carry over the credit onto BIE/Norway and Arctic until we used it up.

We were not able to. I had booked our flights home from our WC from Reykjavík, and then we decided to add the Iceland to NYC leg. As our tickets were already booked, we had to pay the cost of our flight from NYC. If the tickets are booked, it’ll likely be what the change fee is.

They made cad tea from hot tea, I imagine they’d do similarly for iced coffee. Worst case, maybe get several shots of spares so in the machine in World Cafe and add ice? We use a French press at home and locally roasted coffee beans. I know we go through a pound of beans in a little over a week, so for us it is not a cheap habit. I was surprised at how much I did like coffee from the Nespresso machine in the room. I had assumed it was similar to the Keurigs, which don’t impress me in the least. I now know I need to pick up some dark roast Nespresso pods for our next trip. While DH is frequently willing to do a coffee run to the Living Room, I’m not!

Not in my experience. I used the Nespresso machine regularly on the world cruise during my Covid arrest. I was able to get more pods, but not different pods. At one point, I was kicking myself about not getting some dark roasts in pods before we left. I definitely will the next time.

Yes. A friend of mine needed her drugs refrigerated on the world cruise. She left her meds in the medical center and went down at a scheduled time to get them. It wasn’t a big deal.

We had tomahawk steaks. I think twice, if I remember correctly. There were also quite a few lobster nights.

I’m sorry to hear that. We flew them in 2019, on a trip to Turkey. It wasn’t the first time we had flown with them, but the most recent. They were fabulous and picked up the pieces, especially when we had to dispute with Pegasus Air. I’m sorry to hear they’ve deteriorated.

Yes, it’s excellent and better than most US airlines.

If Viking is running a shuttle, it’s free. Getting around Boston is very easy on the T.

What I do is accept Viking Air when we book the cruise. As we get closer to the cruise date, I start looking at flights and see what the difference is, costwise (since we need to book business class). if I can book cheaper on my own, I do. I also have to take into consideration the addition of Air Plus as well as the deviation. I just finished booking our flights for the Northern Lights cruise we are doing in Jan. I was able to book our flights about $1800 less than Viking, not taking plus and deviations into consideration. I need to book flights for March as well, and it looks like it’s going to be an even larger savings booking our own.

Yes, you can book a one way fare with Viking. We are doing Bangkok to Vancouver next year and need only one way as Vancouver is a local airport for us.

As mentioned, I treat Viking like an airline ticket. Once it’s booked, I don’t look back. Sometime prices go down, sometimes up. We have a cruise booked next year that is sold out and considerably more than when I originally booked it. I only looked back because we were going to try to book my MIL on the cruise. It all evens out at the end.

I agree with you. The only time I thought that the lectures were too basic was when an evolutionary biologist was lecturing on how the world was populated. She had to give some basic biology lessons, which were very elementary…..for me. I spent 35 years doing scientific research and have taken more biology classes than I can remember! Even so, she did it clearly and concisely.

We used AeroMexico to fly in and out of South America. This wasn’t through Viking though. They were pretty good.

Why cruise?

You can also use a second voucher per person if you do a back to back under a single itinerary. We were able to buy 16 vouchers on our river cruise in 2022. We have 4 left!

They’re separate, and quite nice. Sadly, I can’t use them regularly because my scalp doesn’t like them. My scalp hates about 90% of the shampoos on the market.

Just FYI. I asked about using the USB ports on the back of the TV while we were on the ship. DH was taking a lot of photos and his computer was unsatisfactory to see the detail he wanted to see. We were given a ‘nope’ (quite possibly the first time on Viking we have had). Apparently maintenance needs to be called in if it is done. The manager at the Explorer’s desk said in his tenure, the only time they did this was to allow a man who used hearing aids use a device where he could watch TV through an amplifier of sorts connected to his hearing aids.

I know a woman I met on the World Cruise who managed to not only snag a cabin, she was able to upgrade from a DV to a PV a few months before we left. I know another who was able to upgrade from a PV to an ES a few months before. So on sold out cruises, there seems to be a lot of jockeying around of rooms, probably up until the 120 day point where penalties start kicking in.

I was commenting on the label companies use as ‘animal free testing’. Not anything else.

I can tell you that when we were in Turkey, we did not apply for a visa. We have been to Turkey before and used their e visa without issue but when we hit Istanbul on the WC, we were meeting up with friends, staying in Istanbul and doing things with them. I was told by Viking as long as we were not leaving Istanbul, we were good to go.

This is really semantics. If a chemical has been pre tested in animals from another entity, and Ecolabs uses the same chemical, the chemical HAS been tested in animals, just not by them. Ecolabs hasn’t tested it, so is piggybacking on other companies results but claiming THEY haven’t tested it in animals.

THIS ^. Every time we had an issue, they contacted us if we wrote it on the survey.

We just did 6 months on the Viking Neptune. It’s amazing how crammed sea days can get and you not even touch the stuff you brought along with you! For example, I brought a knitting project along and the only reason I opened the bag and started working on it was because I had 5 days quarantined in my cabin with Covid. This happened about 2/3 the way through our cruise. I also had my iPad, a Kindle (which is loaded with more books than I could ever read) and we brought along a small Bose Bluetooth speaker so we could play music in our cabin. However, we wound up spending much more time socializing with new friends.