1st time river cruiser: LIVE from Viking on the Douro!

[AllisonJames]

I think everyone’s points are well taken. The issue with the Douro as I see it is that other than Porto, there aren’t “Ports” per se, where part of the experience is waking up (or arriving at any time) in another location where you can walk off and experience that new town or city. So you are kind of hostage to the excursions and the coaches…there really is no flexibility except for Porto. So you don’t really get the benefits that other river cruise itineraries have. And on the Douro, the scenic sailing is definitely a strong aspect of the experience. 

[Roz]

The number and length of coach tours depends on the river,  the port stops, and the tours that are offered. I've taken European river cruises where many of the tours involved walking off the ship and right into town.

 

I personally think that Viking's omnipresent TV ads give people a wrong idea of what's involved with river cruises. 

[pontac]

Reading this forum for some years I've found that people have different needs from a river cruise.

 

There are many who want to go on excursions and for whom the only  purpose of the boat is to get them from one place to another without having to pack and check out of a different hotel each day. And amongst this substantial group there are many for whom the available excursions are not enough and they want to hire a guide organise their own sightseeing in addition.

 

I'm afraid that the Douro is  rural, and until the railway was built in the late 1800s and the modern roads constructed with EU money travel was very difficult.

 

Towns of any size were built away from the river for protection because invaders and pirates travelled by river.

 

The itinerary and a map would have shown you what to expect.

 

You say your cruise didn't "get the benefits that other river cruise itineraries have" but what are these benefits? The Douro has the benefit of being quiet and rural. The towns are small and sleepy and there's nothing much to see. But we all have different wants. I live in and old city (not London) with Roman and pre-Roman  remains, a medieval centre and an ancient cathedral. Walking around an old town on holiday isn't much of an attraction for me. But if you live in a new city maybe it is. If you live in a rural place maybe the buzz of a bustling city is an attraction.

 

I went of the Scenic 11 day cruise that ended as yours started and I wandered around the town of Pinhao and a short walk in Regua.

 

The river cruise lines do a pretty good job of meeting competing customer interests but I wonder if it's time to do cruises where the cruise is the most important feature, and others where excursions are uppermost. Some lines already make certain dates dedicated to cuisine with a a guest name chef or wine with tastings. Perhaps it's time to stop being all things to all people on every cruise.

[AllisonJames]

Pontac - I absolutely did my research and knew there would be quite a bit of time on the coach and I understood about the rural aspect of the Douro, the scenery was a major attraction of the cruise. For me, the issue is the lack of transparency/advance information regarding the actual schedule of each day and how much scenic sailing actually takes place and when. I had even contacted them in advance to try to get more specifics on timing in case we wanted to try to “do our own thing” on some stops…I couldn’t get any further details. We didn’t find out the actual schedule for the next day until late the night before. For example, we didn’t know that initially the ship wasn’t scheduled to depart Porto until the morning after embarkation. That would have been a total of three overnights in Porto…we ended up departing shortly after we embarked due to the lock schedule and we were glad we got to enjoy sailing out of Porto and a few hours of sailing on our first evening. I think your idea to have more cruises with more sailing time is a good one, I would have loved at least three half days of sailing on the Douro. However, I also now understand better that the locks and docks schedule drives some of this and competition must be fierce with so many ships on the river. My posts and comments are intended to help other first-timers know more about these aspects of the experience.

[holomoana]

Allison - I appreciate your posts and comments as my husband and I have not been on river cruise and are seeking information. Although we have a different itinerary scheduled for next year, we were thinking of adding the Douro to make the most of our time in Europe. You and the other posters have given us much to consider. Thank you.

[Host Jazzbeau]

Reading your review and comparing it to my experience on Scenic's 10-nt Douro sailing (same itinerary that @pontac mentioned above), my reaction is that you chose the exact opposite of the cruise that my research led me to.  I had read about the rafting – because most of the 7-nt cruises have similar itineraries and end up in the same ports – so I chose Scenic's 10-nt which alters that rhythm and is usually alone in port.  I knew that the Douro is a short river, so even going from Porto to the Spanish border and back isn't a lot of miles [or kms] – but the Douro is also one of the few rivers where all sailing is in the daytime so you get to experience it [most other European river cruises depart during dinner and sail through the night] so in that respect you got more 'sailing' experience than most first-time river cruises.  I also knew that there wouldn't be many ports to walk around from the ship [except Pinhao and Regua as @pontac mentioned, but maybe your cruise didn't stop at these?] and that a coach would be necessary to get up the steep embankment even to nearby attractions.

 

My biggest worry about a Douro cruise [as also about our upcoming Bordeaux cruise] is that my wife has zero interest in wine – so I paid attention to the excursion choices.  Some cruise lines offer very few choices [and my impression is that Viking is like that] while others offer many [AMA and Scenic in my experience].  That led me to choose Scenic for the Douro [we had very few winery visits, thanks to the alternative choices] and AMA for Bordeaux [where again we will select the non-winery choices] – this is only an example, since we are oddballs in not wanting winery visits on wine-area cruises, but it shows how you can select a cruise to suit your particular interests.

 

The one thing I didn't know about Porto is that all the river cruise lines except Scenic dock across the river in Vila Nova de Gaia where rafting is common – I was pleasantly surprised to find that Scenic owns its own dock right in Porto, so we were never rafted there and we could walk off the ship to sightsee Porto [and to get to our post-cruise hotel, which was a few meters away from the ship].

 

None of this is to criticize you:  it is very hard to research river cruising before your first cruise, because you don't know what to ask about.  [Even after multiple river cruises I didn't know to ask about the docking situation in Porto – I just lucked out!]  It is also possible that river cruising, under the best circumstances, isn't for you.  But I think you had the bad luck to choose a cruise that ended up being a bad choice for you on several levels.  Now you know what to ask, and for a second cruise you can avoid many of the problems you experienced.  

 

If you are willing to try another, I suggest the Rhône which has a mixture of interests (gastronomy in Lyon, Roman ruins like the Pont du Gard, Valrhona chocolate, Van Gogh in Arles, Les Baux and the Carrières des Lumières, cowboys in Camargue, and of course wine).  But no Rhône cruise includes all these options – you need to compare the itineraries for many different cruise lines and zero in on those experiences that are most interesting for you.  We did the AMA 7-nt cruise from Lyon to Arles, and I'm now considering going back to do the Tauck 13-nt cruise from Cannes to Geneva because it focuses on the southern part of the Rhône and the Saône and therefore doesn't duplicate much of what we did in the middle part of the Rhône on AMA.

[Canal archive]

According to an Australian friend Scenic actually waited to start their Douro cruising, specifically around the mooring situation. Portugal and the Portuguese is and are in general European terms different they knew how they wanted their river cruises to work and went for it, be blowed to how the rest of Europe worked. They have gradually softened their approach to a certain extent but I for one applaud that they wouldn’t be pushed around by the so called big companies and stuck to their guns metaphorically. Actually I may be just a tad biased as Portugal is Great Britain’s oldest alliance.

[pontac]

7 hours ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

Scenic's 10-nt which alters that rhythm and is usually alone in port.

 

Unfortunately not so in 2024

7 hours ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

 That led me to choose Scenic for the Douro [we had very few winery visits, thanks to the alternative choices]

 

Conversely we are interested in wine and selected all the winery visits. Disappointing in that while we visited places that made wine we didn't visit the part that made wine, instead in two we walked through barrel cellars and on all we were taken to a tourist tasting room where we tasted two of their lower priced wines.

 

7 hours ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

Scenic owns its own dock right in Porto, so we were never rafted

 

Again, unfortunately not so in 2024. We were rafted to an Emerald boat both at the beginning and end of the cruise.

 

The Douro is chock-a-block with hotel boats.

[AllisonJames]

Well, I will just wrap up my comments on this thread to say that I wrote a letter to Viking and our travel agent really went to bat for us on the issue of not being able to use the balcony of our suite or enjoy a river view for nearly all of the time the ship was docked and Viking has provided a resolution that we are very satisfied with. We will sail Viking again due to the service, the ships and the very well-organized shore excursions. We are glad we took advantage of the conference in Porto to add on the river cruise, try it out and see the beautiful Douro, even if everything wasn’t completely the best fit for us.

[BriSquared]

Thank you for the very informative posts and review. I was hoping you could provide one other piece of information.  You noted 36 hours in Porto.  Did you arrive in Porto the evening of when you were in Regua or was it an early morning arrival in Porto. I think the former but I wanted to double check.  Thanks so much.