Vantage River Voyager Sep 16,2019

[rdfin]

I previously posted this in the wrong place. So here is my second try.

 

We have done river Cruises before and enjoyed the relaxing pace. I found this Rhine and Moselle cruise leaving Amsterdam on September 16 for 14 days with Vantage. I was attracted to this particular company bc my husband and I are traveling with a single person and Vantage has single cabins. Has anyone done this cruise? Would appreciate both positive and negative comments. Thank you all rdfin

[Shmoo here]

I previously posted this in the wrong place. So here is my second try.

 

We have done river Cruises before and enjoyed the relaxing pace. I found this Rhine and Moselle cruise leaving Amsterdam on September 16 for 14 days with Vantage. I was attracted to this particular company bc my husband and I are traveling with a single person and Vantage has single cabins. Has anyone done this cruise? Would appreciate both positive and negative comments. Thank you all rdfin

While we haven't done this particular itinerary, yet (we're looking at it also), we've done two trips with Vantage (Grand European cruise, and China). Both were great, which is why we're sticking with Vantage for our next trip.

[ural guy]

We're signed up for this trip, reverse sailing, leaving in 45 days. It'll be our second time on the River Voyager, and I think it will be great. Being a late season sailing, it is quite a bit cheaper than earlier in the season.

 

This is one of the longer cruises on the Rhine. I do wish you spent more time on the Mosele, but I like the some of the smaller stops that other line might not make. Having a free day in Schweich is nice, we plan on returning to Trier using public transportation.

[rdfin]

Have a great trip. Trier should be great. Looking forward to your review. It is good to know cruisers do take Vantage. Thank you, rdfin

Edited September 16, 2018 by rdfin
add sentence

[Rorygirl4528]

We are taking that same cruise on Sept 16 that you are thinking of. It will be our 3rd river cruise with Vantage. We went from Amsterdam to Budapest two yrs ago down the Rhine/Mosell and Danube. Lots of castles on that trip.

I’m looking forward to Amsterdam to Basel since we will be going to towns that are new to us.

We have always been pleased with Vantage. Professional staff, good food, and interesting excursions. 

[rdfin]

So glad you will be on the cruise.  I am Rosemary and my husband is Rob from the Jersey Shore.  We are traveling with a friend Kathy.  The only other Vantage trip we took was the American Canyons which was great.  We are looking forward to this trip. We have been on the Rhine but not on the Moselle.  I hope the rivers have more water then last year.  So praying for lots of snow in those mountains.  I hope a lot of folks see these posts and we can have our Own Voyager Vantage Board.  Looking forward to meeting you

[FuelScience]

We did this cruise with Vantage back in 2015 (where does the time go?). I love this itinerary. The Rhine gets a lot of attention, but the scenery on the Mosel is spectacular. I'm glad that they're still including the local hosted dinner in Speyer. That was a lot of fun. I'm sorry to see that they've made the tour of Luxembourg an optional excursion.

 

If it were me, I would consider skipping the optional excursion and booking a taxi or taking a bus into Trier (it's 9 miles away). For some reason Vantage delays the Trier tour and takes it from Bernkastel (26 miles away). The Trier tour doesn't do the spectacular Landesmuseum which has a great collection of Roman artifacts, including the coins from the great Trier Gold Hoard where over 2,500 Roman gold coins were found back in 1993.

 

Regardless, this is a great itinerary. You might want to fly into Amsterdam a couple of days early to shake the jet lag and see some of the city. You'd have to get yourself from the airport to a hotel, but it's easy to do. Finally, we chose to fly out of Zurich rather than Basel. It meant arranging our own transportation to Zurich (there are trains from Basel to the Zurich airport), but it also meant that we could get a direct flight to North America rather than flying to FRA or LHR and getting another flight to the US from there.

 

I posted while on this cruise in 2015. Links to my review and one more are below.

 

Have a great cruise.

 

 

[rdfin]

Thanks FuelScience for forwarding all this info. Great tips especially about Trier.

[ural guy]

Fuel-  Usually, I'd thank you for posting the link to your 2015 trip, as we are scheduled to board the River Voyager next Friday, Basel-Amsterdam, and it would add to our excitement. 

 

The way the river is right now, your review is hard to read.  It does look like a really nice route.

 

Best wishes to the Sep 2019 crowd, our first Vantage trip was great, fingers still crossed....

[rdfin]

How is the river now I heard this year was very low

[Rorygirl4528]

Hi Rosemary. I am Jan, husband Randy.  We are from WA state. We will be traveling with two couples that we met on our first Vantage river cruise. Looking forward to meeting you. We will be flying to Amsterdam a day or two before the cruise. FYI if you are going in early...there is some sort of convention in Amsterdam with 35,000 people coming. Hotel rooms are going fast. I finally found one by the airport and we will just take the train into town. 

[rdfin]

Good info, I guess I better decide really quickly on weather we want to go early.  We have been to Amsterdam twice before so I wasn’t considering going early.  Thanks for the tip.

[rdfin]

We got our flight info from Vantage for this trip.  Land in Amsterdam at 7:15am a little early.  What does one do until you get onboard the ship.  Does Vantage have little excursions to go on 

[Judy795]

I did this trip last year in the Fall.  We spent a few days first in Amsterdam.  At the end, we flew from Bern, Switzerland to Vienna, Austria, and joined a Globus tour of Austria and Switzerland.

I had positive feelings about the cruise.  It was our second time on the River Voyager.  The accommodations were fine.  The passengers tended to be 75 and older. The food was fine, if not exciting. Nice to unpack once.  Negatives: not enough time ashore in interesting places, half the time docked too far  from town to walk back to ship. I could see that a train line ran along the river, as well as a road.  It would have been fun to do the trip by train.  But then there is packing and unpacking.  Can't have it both ways.

[rdfin]

Thanks for your comments. I think this is the problem with all Cruises you are on a ship schedule.  I am glad you had a good experience on this ship and with Vantage.