Buying Viking Air Question?

If we buy the Viking Air for our river cruise can we go a few days early so we can adjust to the time difference? Do they charge you a change fee even though its two years away? I booked a Egypt cruise/tour with Viking Riverboats and want to go early. Will we have a problem? They are offering $500.00 off air so we have booked it with the air portion this time. We booked our own air for our Viking Ocean cruise this May. Anyone know? Thank you.

Even allowing for the fact that Viking River and Ocean operate in very similar ways and have a large overlap of customers, you might be better off asking this question in the River Cruise forum.

We paid the extra fee to arrange to fly in two days early for both our Viking river cruise (next week) and our future Viking ocean cruise. Without that fee, Viking will arrange to have your flight arrive the day of the cruise. The extra fee allows you the flexibility to choose the airline (from their list), arrival date and seat selection about 10 months prior to the end of your cruise. Just did it today for our ocean cruise. Very pleased with the outcome.

Book the air now. When the time comes to choose flights (no earlier then about 310 days out), pay the custom air fee (in other words, don't add it to your invoice until you want to actually use it).

In the mean time, you can do your homework and see if you can do better booking flights on your own since coming in early is going to cost you a deviation fee of $100pp and possible additional airfare (set by the airlines not Viking) AND you will lose the included transfers. If you can do better booking the flights and transfers on your own, then cancel the flights with Viking. They will return your money (although there is a cut off date for this, which you should get from Viking just so that you cancel in a timely manner, should it come to that).

Viking's $500 off on air fare is no deal if you can find you can fly for even cheaper booking on your own. For instance, Viking was offering $500 off bringing their airfare to Barcelona down to $795. I went on line to buy my own and paid closer to $600 including our transfers.

Remember, too, that the $500 savings is a limited offer. It is $500 off the flights that they are offering; it is not $500 off any flight that you want to take.

I know this is a lot to digest but you still have time before you have to do anything.