We did London(Greenwich) to Bergen, embarked 6.24.23, Viking Venus. Our 4th Viking Ocean cruise, we love the ships, the facilities and food are excellent. On this sailing, the excursions and excursions staff was really the weak link. We usually like Viking's included excursion. Here, though, two of the 9 were truly terrible. The Edinburgh included excursion was basically a minimally informative bus transfer into town (if you dock at Newhaven like we did, take the efficient above-ground light rail tram, way faster as it avoids car traffic, and super easy) in heavy traffic, that dumps you off near the castle (which was sold out of tickets) for 45 min of on-your-own touristy shopping before returning. No walking tour component, very little info about Edinburgh. In Leknes (Lofoten), the included tour was totally different than (and way way worse than) the tour described pre-cruise on the My Viking Journey site, and described on-board on the Viking Voyager app. One of the 3 stops on the tour was literally a highway rest stop where the only activity was using the toilets, for 30 minutes. It was just to kill time. Moreover, the Viking excursion staff was clueless, they had no idea that the excursion provided bore zero resemblance to the tour they advertised. (Indeed, the excursion staff was terrible overall - they gave us completely wrong information several times, couldn't answer basic questions about some of their excursions, and seemed totally unfamiliar with the cruise locations or offerings, and were generally totally disorganized.) That's a big problem in Leknes, as you dock in the industrial port (nothing there), the town is a short shuttle bus drive away, but there's nothing in town worth seeing. My advice for Leknes - pay for one of the farther ranging excursions where you can see and do something, or arrange in advance to rent your own car for the day, lots of spectacular places that can easily be explored by car. Note that many of the ports on this cruise are tiny, these aren't big cities with well known key sights - so I recommend that you do your homework well in advance, and figure out what you want to see and do, and figure out how to accomplish that, whether through the ship's excursions or independent activities. The other included excursions were quite good. The other frustration on this cruise was that the Guest Services/Explorers Desk staff (essentially the ship's "front desk") was often unfriendly, often not helpful, and it might take 3 or 4 requests of them to get one straight forward thing done. They were quite a contrast to literally all the other crew on the ship who were super friendly, helpful, cheerful, etc.
Overall we really liked this itinerary. A rare chance to cruise well above the arctic circle during the midnight sun where the sun never set for several of the cruise nights. Some stunning scenery and spectacular landscapes. We did the Viking Homelands cruise in 2018, and wanted to return to Norway ever since. This Into the Midnight Sun cruise did not disappoint.
