Shores - included and optional

[porrah]

Does anyone know when Viking posts the excursions? I have logged into My Viking Journey and it says nothing available. Mind you, we are in the "cheap seats" so not allowed to book before Aug 19 for our October trip. Does that mean maybe the excursions are available, but not posted for me until my booking date?

[geffric]

Does anyone know when Viking posts the excursions? I have logged into My Viking Journey and it says nothing available. Mind you, we are in the "cheap seats" so not allowed to book before Aug 19 for our October trip. Does that mean maybe the excursions are available, but not posted for me until my booking date?

 

You might call Viking or your TA. My guess is that it is too early for the excursions to be up.. also check your roll call.

[aungrl]

Does anyone know when Viking posts the excursions? I have logged into My Viking Journey and it says nothing available. Mind you, we are in the "cheap seats" so not allowed to book before Aug 19 for our October trip. Does that mean maybe the excursions are available, but not posted for me until my booking date?

 

It’s way too early for these excursions to be posted, but if you want to get an idea of what the excursions will be, just log onto the regular Viking Ocean website - don’t go through MyVikingJourney - and look at this itinerary. The shore excursions that have been offered on prior sailings will be listed. THere’s no guarantee that these will be the exact ones that end up being offered, but they should be pretty close. That will at least give you an initial idea of what you might want to focus on once they end up being posted. FWIW, it’s typically about 100-120 days before sailing that excursions are posted, sometimes earlier but that’s a general timeframe

[Cape Hernlopen]

Dear Porrah:

 

Viking Ocean posted (yesterday) excursion information for the October 7 cruise out of Hong Kong. This was 101 days until the Cruise.

Joel Barry Brown

[Peregrina651]

Does anyone know when Viking posts the excursions? I have logged into My Viking Journey and it says nothing available. Mind you, we are in the "cheap seats" so not allowed to book before Aug 19 for our October trip. Does that mean maybe the excursions are available, but not posted for me until my booking date?

 

Everybody sees them at the same time, typically 120 days or so before the saildate but there are some sailing that didn't post until close to 90 days. No way of predicting for any given sailing.

 

In the meantime, descriptions of the possible optional tours can be see on Viking's main website. Go to the itinerary page for your cruise, scroll down to the Day by day and click on learn more. Note that these pages for the individual ports of call are generic pages; every cruise that calls in Barcelona shows the same page regardless of the time of year or the name of the itinerary. Prices and times are not included but the included tour is duly marked. Also note the info on the generic page is subject to change and not all tours will be available on all sailings.

[Host Jazzbeau]

We're doing the British Isles Explorer itinerary in August – ours will be only the 3rd sailing of this itinerary. We were able to figure out some probable choices early on because other Viking itineraries visit some of our ports, but many are new to this itinerary. So we had to wait until tours for the first sailing were posted – and even then there were some differences once our actual offerings came up.

 

Two points from my experience:

(1) It's a good idea to set your alarm for midnight Pacific time on the day [before] you can book – to make sure you have the best chance at the options/times you want. [That was 3 AM Eastern for me. :eek:]

(2) Although 'included shore excursions' was part of the attraction of this cruise for us [and justification for the high price], we ended up not booking a single one. We did book some optionals, but in general the included tours [and even many of the optionals] cover too little ground. If you've been to a place before, it's 'same old same old.' If you haven't been and have done some research on what you'd like to see, the included tour probably only covers a small portion of your priority list. We were able to book third-party tours that include everything we want to see, and we got folks on our roll call to join us so that the price is reasonable. [i guess my point is, don't feel that because you have already paid for them you MUST take the included tours. Time is a limited resource too, and often spending a little more money makes much better use of your time.]