stitchinthyme9

For anyone who might still be following this, I have an update. Yesterday Viking called us to say they had reviewed our case and decided to extend us new vouchers as a "one-time goodwill gesture", with the same conditions as the original ones had. We received them today and though they're about $600 less than what we paid for the 2020 cruise, we decided to accept them since losing $600 is better than losing $7300. Before we book another cruise, we will be looking into whether we can find trip insurance that will cover the vouchers -- not through Viking, since we know theirs explicitly does not.

Also - sometimes things do happen that force you to cancel within a day of departure, and I still think that Viking should at the very least change its policy with TripMate (which they said Viking wrote) such that vouchers issued for cancelled cruises are included in the trip insurance. My complaint is that there is no way at all to recover the loss if you are forced to cancel. It's not like we had any idea that we'd have a death in the family before we decided to accept the voucher.

@Squawkman- Do you really think the extra day would have made a difference? (For what it's worth, we got the call that evening, not early in the day.)

In late 2019 my husband and I booked a river cruise (Belgium/Netherlands) for 2020. This cruise was cancelled due to covid and we were offered a credit towards a future cruise which would expire in August 2022. I was a little dubious about this since we didn't know whether the pandemic would be over by then, so I emailed customer service asking if it could be refunded or extended if we couldn't use it in time; I was assured that it could. The documentation did say that once redeemed, the credit would not be extended or refunded and would have no cash value, but we didn't expect there to be any problems. We booked another cruise (Amsterdam to Budapest) with extensions on either end; we were supposed to depart on December 14. On December 12, we were informed that my father-in-law was not expected to live more than a few days. The next day we cancelled the cruise, and my FIL died on December 14, the day we were supposed to leave. By this time, due to the stress from a death in the immediate family, we had forgotten about the credit from the 2020 cruise and once we did realize it, we thought our trip insurance (TripMate, purchased through Viking) would cover our loss. We were shocked to discover that it would not and that we would lose the more than $7000 we had paid towards the 2020 cruise and applied to this one. TripMate said that Viking sets the policy and they had specifically excluded vouchers from previous cruises. My husband called, and I sent multiple emails to Viking's customer service explaining the situation and asking for a little compassion as cancelling the trip was unavoidable at that point, but all they will say is, "Sorry, that's our policy". I guess my FIL should have chosen a more convenient time to die. I'm aware that we don't have any legal recourse here, but I think that issuing vouchers that are completely unrecoverable even with their trip insurance, is a horrible way to do business. Furthermore, it also encourages people who are sick with covid or norovirus to board their ships, if the choice is between that and losing thousands of dollars. Now that I've been looking for it, I see that this has happened to many others and Viking has been similarly lacking in any compassion, so I'm posting this in the hopes that maybe someone will see it and think twice before booking with them, and especially before accepting a credit for a cancelled cruise.