European River Cruises

[purplegrattan]

I've been cruising the web trying to figure out which river cruise will work for my family. Here's my dilemma: My husband and I will be travelling with our six year old son, as well as my German only speaking mother-in-law. It seems that Uniworld offers a nice "family cruise", however it's an English speaking cruise line. It doesn't appear that the German speaking lines (we are all fluent in German) offer a family cruise. I really don't want my son to be bored stiff with adults, it would be fun for him to be around other children or at least catered to with some fun kids excursions. Can anyone offer advice? We're looking for summer of 2012. We're partial to the Danube but are open to anything right now.

[Kellie Poodle]

We cruised with Uniworld on the River Princess from Budapest to Amsterdam in 2008. Though all the staff spoke English, it was not their native language. Just about all of them spoke German with the possible exception of the young man who was the keyboard player, who was Hungarian.

 

The program presentations would probably be in English as would be the menus and printed material, but I'm fairly certain that the crew will speak German.

 

The company might be American, but the people they hire to work on the boats are more local.

 

You could call Uniworld and ask them.

[Talisker92]

I would suggest Vantage's Castles along the Rhine. We did this last year and enjoyed it thoroughly. The story and pictures are on our website http://www.stevekathytravels.com

[gnome12]

I don't know about the German language issue, but I do know that Tauck offers Family Bridges programs that seem to really cater to kids.

 

Another point about the German issue, being able to commumicate with the crew is one thing (and I think most of ours on the River Queen last year were Eastern European not German) but the fact that the passengers will almost all be English speaking. (We had one couple that spoke German on our cruise.) You might find that the whole social aspect of a cruise is missing for you (or at least your German-speaking members), and from personal experience on a cycling tour where almost everyone spoke French I found myself isolated to a group of 4 English speakers. It wasn't fun.

 

My suggestion is to keep exploring the German cruises and hoping that you can come up with one with a kids program.

[lddam]

Check out the following site, especially if all in your party speak fluent German.

 

http://www.scylla.ch/

[newlondon]

I would point out that Scylla runs the Tauck boats and does an outstanding job. On our cruise, however, it was all English speaking; you would need, therefore, to do some research as to German speaking itineraries. I would also be mindful of the fact that one or two other kids will not make one of these cruises-specifically designed for adults- anything other than boring.

[gnome12]

If you can do without passengers speaking German, these tours really seem to cater to families, with lots of things that kids would like to do.

http://www.tauckbridges.com/itineraries/europe.aspx

 

As has been mentioned, Scylla runs Tauck's boats, so that you would likely have no problems dealing with the crew. If you do the Danube tour much of the tour is through German speaking areas, but the excursions would be exclusively in English.