Saba2009

If you want to tip individuals of the crew make sure you pay them directly in cash. The Viking tip system where you pay to the system go directly to Viking and does not go to the crew. You probably want it to go to the crew! Then pay directly! Unless you want to sponsor Viking of course.

As I understand there are serious problems with the shower glass and also stair rails. What about the glass in the overflow pool? I would never ever go for a swim there! Good to know that Viking already have made a rescue frame if the glass breaks, but with the current track record on the glass installations I would never trust it.

It is also very interesting to see Vikings love for glass. Lots of glass vases in the bookshelfs. Not problematic on the river boats, but in heavy sea on the seven seas it will be interesting to see how they will fly about. Why not fix them properly before another accident.

A 100% discussion is no good. You are both right in some. Of course ships do carry spares for quite a few things. They are at sea for longer period and may need to do repairs. But this is for known pieces that may break. Some even have spare anchor and propeller!

For a plane?? How can you repair when you are flying??? And there are stocks on many airports.

For your car? One used to have spare bulbs, tyre, jack, even a can of petrol. Nowadays there are nothing - but you have a mobile and could get help quickly.

As for the Star situation - these generators are huge beasts. And they are of a brand new design. As I understand from comments is that the problems are related to some parts of these engines. And with new equipment you rarely know what will break. One of the other ships in Tallin today always carry a lot of spare as a part of their ships setup. Not that they need it, but they have it available. VS is brand new and also run by a brand new ocean going company. So they are probably like a new car. Save money and have no spares. They are also not doing any longer ocean crossings nor world cruises. They are close to a harbor at all times and therefore should not need that much spares. They will not even see much bad weather on their cruises. Just look at all the glass items and other nice items they carry in their common areas. It will look like a nightmare after the first storm they encounter. But having many employees from the river cruises they do not know this part of cruising. Enjoy the glass vases as long as you can!

For sure you will never see a 100% backup. You probably will have to take off passengers to be able to float.

I think it is a good idea to leave out these ports. Special when one look at the security on Viking. It is so easy for one person to walk in with explosives and weapons. They hardly check you ID cards when you come back to ship.

No intention to snipe you, sorry if you felt I was doing that. What you are measuring is great, and you also refer to servers in Venice and Barcelona. That's even better because I assume that Viking does not use local servers in the ports you visit. So you are back to the Satellite communication. I have explained some of the issues earlier. However I personally do not understand why cruise ships in general is not connected to the internet via the local installations in the various ports. Even in big cities and in remote small ports this is the same problems. Why cannot the various ports offer a high speed relay to the ship that can be hooked up to the ships system and sometimes you will have unbelievable speeds. There are standards for these systems and no big deal actually. One can understand the limitations with satellite systems as the satellite has to be in focus with the ships antenna systems. A bit of sea and that is difficult some times. But when you are in port you have high speed 50 meters from the gangway some times. Why not use this??

Since i mentioned the new Satellite for increased capacity then you can see it here http://www.telenorsat.com/thor7/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/THOR-7-satellite-overview-and-technical-specification.pdf

I see there are a lot of technical experts here:-)

All cruise lines use more or less the same satellites for their Internet connection. That is the biggest constraint on the system. A couple of weeks ago a new satellite was launched by the Norwegian Telenor and this is specifically designed for communication. It is in orbit now and are being prepared for communication. Then there will be higher speeds delivered to ships specially in Europe.

The other issue is the WiFi. You are in a steel cage and it is difficult to send signals throughout the ship. That is due to the physics of it, - not the Cruise line. So you need time to be able to optimize and move some wifi connections.

A third issue is of course your iPhone, iPad, etc. Not all are set up correctly. Not all of them are actually good at WiFi. And when many have a couple of mobiles and a couple of iPads and laptop hooked up to the net then you get into trouble. 450 cabins. 4 units per room. Then you suddenly have 1800 connections needed! Then the crew have a few connections both for work and time off. So maybe you easily have 3 000 connections to handle with a limited bandwidth on the satelitte.

On land many have huge bandwidths to their homes. But still a lot only have 1.5 Mb to download and 0.25 Mb to send.

Have a realistic approach to this. What you guys want is 5mb each multiplied with 3000 users in a max case. Even your home WiFi a miles away of handling this:-)

A lot of emails and blogs can be updated offline on your units. Why not do that and stop for a coffee at McDonalds or Starbucks and upload all you want then you are there. And download what you want at the same time.