Viking Cruise ads on PBS, with their image of their “longships” winding their way down rivers past castles and palaces, hooked my spouse who, for a long time, dreamed of going on a river cruise. Request more information, and your mail will be inundated with a steady stream of brochures cataloguing all of their river and ocean cruises as well as upcoming deals. Well, it finally worked on us. In 2023, we finally took the plunge and went on a Viking river cruise for our anniversary.
My spouse was all-in. I was excited but also a bit apprehensive. I’ve found that the trips I’ve enjoyed the most have often been self-planned excursions with mostly flexible itineraries.
Our cruise was the eight-day “Paris and the Heart of Normandy” cruise on the Seine. I’d been to Paris before but my husband suggested this specific cruise as it put us on the ship right by the Eiffel tower on our anniversary and I had been learning French so he thought it would be nice for me to go there again. We added on three days in Paris prior to the cruise– in part, to recover from the air travel so we could enjoy the cruise more and so we would have some time in Paris together (I’d been there before, he hadn’t except on a Eurostar trip there and back in one day).
Along the way, we found that many to most couples we met were combining cruises to visit more countries. When we would tell them we were just doing this one, we’d get the sad, knowing nod, “Ahhh…not retired yet, are you?” Ah, to have the type of retirement that allows you to go on two Viking Ocean voyages and then three back to back cruises!
But then, I’m not sure I’d want to –though I’ll admit I AM tempted by their Antarcica expedition for the nature photography aspect.
This isn’t a “trip report” (I may write one specifically about our cruise in a later post), but some things we loved (and didn’t love) about our experience. We all have different things we love. I’m an introvert and some of the things I enjoyed only in small doses — like dining with new people at dinner most evenings — are things you might love about a cruise like this.
Our opinions in a nutshell? My husband is eager to do another one sometime, but does admit he enjoyed our self-planned drive around the Scottish Highlands much more.
Me? There is so much to do in the world! While I cannot really say anything negative about the ships, the places, the food, or anything else, if I had to pick just a few places I could go or trips to go on again in my life, it would not likely be a river cruise — unless it was a cruise specifically geared toward, say, bird or nature photography or to a place I might otherwise not travel alone. So I AM tempted by some of their ocean cruises and would consider that next time over a river cruise.
Also note that we booked and paid for our trip ourselves. This is NOT a sponsored post on behalf of Viking.
Table of Contents
Thinking about a Viking Cruise?
Do you enjoy meeting new people, visiting new places but are OK with only visiting them for a little bit of time? Do you love good food and dining? Have you not been to Europe (for instance) before and are nervous about travel and want a comfortable way to take your first trip abroad? Do you have mobility limitations, or are you traveling with someone with mobility limitations? Do you want to travel in a moving hotel that goes place to place without having to move your luggage? A Viking Cruise might be just the thing for you.
Are you someone who is obsessive about planning their own trip itineraries? Do you like to spend a significant amount of time in a single place or dislike group tours 1 or group dining? Are you looking for a language immersion experience? Perhaps a Viking Cruise is not the trip for you.
What follows are my thoughts on some aspects of the trip, in random order. While I brought my camera on this trip, it was an anniversary trip with my husband so my attention was on togetherness vs. my photography habit, for the most part and I didn’t take videos.
But for those who want the short version, here’s my quick list of likes and dislikes (or pros and cons), also in random order:
What I liked on the Viking Cruise
- Sitting on our veranda, watching scenery, taking photos of the passing landscape or birds.
- Visiting some villages I likely would never have visited and getting off the ship to explore.
- Being able to go place to place with our stuff in the same room.
- Finding there was ample storage under the bed for all of my stuff.
- The food.
- The cappucino machine.
- Resting on the sofas on the top deck.
- The ships were very well-run and clean.
- Meeting some new people.
What I didn’t like on the Viking Cruise.
- Group tours.
- We found, sometimes, that we didn’t want to do group dinners and tried to find tables for two on the upper deck at meals.
- Viking-planned air travel.
- Limited time (the nature of a cruise) in the various ports of call.
- I’m not sure if this belongs on the “don’t like” list, but your fellow passengers are generally like you in that they were entirely English speakers and most of them from the US. Not great if you’re looking for a cultural/language immersion experience.
Dining and Drinking on a Viking River Cruise
I can’t talk about a Viking Cruise without talking about the food.
Oh, the food!
Viking plans menus around cuisine from the country in which you’re traveling; if you’re not getting off the boat to actually sample some local cuisine, you can feel like you’re getting a taste of the area you’re visiting.
All of the dinners were absolutely delicious. I eat mostly a pescetarian diet, but I decided, before I went, to eat whatever was on the tasting menu that night. I even ate escargot — something I thought I’d never touch. And it was wonderful! But I won’t be trying to make it at home.
Breakfast is buffet style but there was a terrific omelet bar and loads of options. Lunch was less formal than dinner, but still good. I gained weight.
Vegetarian and Gluten Free Options
This is the one area of dining about which I heard a few of our tablemates complain. The menus did offer some vegetarian and gluten-free choices — but extremely limited ones, and repetitive. One fellow cruiser found, though, that she was able to special-request some items to expand the foods she could get on the cruise.
Cappucino and Cookies!
Such a small thing, but such a pleasure! Our room was near the snack bar with a selection of cookies, tea, and pastry most of the time. But the star was the coffee machine which dispensed unexpectedly good cappucino. I’m generally not a fan of machine-made drinks but a frequent subject of conversation at the coffee machine was how one could get a machine like this (and how much it might cost).
Community Dining
Dinner aboard a Viking Cruise is a chance to meet your fellow cruisers. The ships are small enough that you see the same people regularly — possibly for better or worse. Our cruise director suggested that they could sort of discreetly arrange it so you could avoid certain people if you were having an issue. I’m not sure if he was joking, or not. I don’t think that he was. I didn’t meet anyone that I actively disliked aboard the cruise. Most people were very friendly.
And the adage that it’s a small world holds true. We were surprised by a couple of people we met on the ship and how, out of everyone in the world taking a cruise, we ended up on a cruise with them.
But us introverts became tired of constant introductions and wanted some alone dining time during this anniversary cruise, so we balanced eating in the formal dining room with eating in the less formal front deck dining area, where we could often find a table for two and were able to see the outdoors.
The Drinks Package
After our cruise I told my daughter that her father had “bought the drinks package.” Her response was, “well, of course he did.” And buying the drinks package — an extra fee that covers bar drinks and the better wines vs the standard table wine they serve during dinner (which, in my opinion, was fine) — is a “no-brainer” if you plan to drink and want the best. In our case, at least, it paid for itself and more.
We noted that the maitre d’ was very attentive to people with the drinks package, anticipating my spouse’s needs as he walked into the bar area and shewing away the servers who had dared to serve me the regular table wine.
There is a tendency, at least in my case, to have the, “I’m going to get my moneysworth!” attitude, which resulted in my drinking more than I, perhaps, should have as alcohol in general tends to disagree with me. I’ll keep this in mind on the next cruise, if there is one.
The Veranda and Rafting Up
All rooms have a view of the river. We had a veranda room where you could walk out onto a small deck where there were two seats and a small table.
I enjoyed having this immensely and found it worth the extra expense — it allowed me to shuffle down to the cappucino machine and then back, and slip out onto the veranda in the early morning if I was up before my husband or to find a quiet and private place to sit and watch the scenery go by as the ship was moving down the river.
However….
Do not expect that you will necessarily have a good view when the ship is docked. Often, the river boat cruises will dock up, due to available space, with one ship alongside another.
This was the view from our veranda on the first night of the cruise:
Not only that, but there were lights which seemed to shine from overhead right into the gap between the curtain and the window, which were keeping me up when I desperately needing sleep.
I understand the need for the ships to do this, and most of the time, our room faced the land side when we were docked, but it was an irritant for that one night, and something that prospective river cruisers should know.
Being on a river, we went through several locks along the way — if you’re smell-sensitive, you might want to close your sliding door for this. I was intrigued by the locks and tended to sit out on the veranda and watch the boat go up and down.
Should you let Viking Cruise book your airfare with your cruise?
Should you book air travel along with your cruise or manage your own?
In our case, if we go on future Viking Cruises, we’ll likely book our own airfare.
The air travel they scheduled for us included a very long layover in Montreal, which then turned into an additional nine hours of layover due to airline issues. By the time we got to Paris, I was extremely tired and irritable, and my husband felt sick. (Not contagious sick, air travel sick, but the delay and fatigue cut into our time in Paris more than expected.)
Viking wasn’t responsible for the additional 9 hour layover, of course. However, they were responsible for the initial long layover. And I get the feeling that layovers like this are commonplace.
Fortunately, if the unexpected occurs during your air travel, Viking has a 24 hour help line. I was able to communicate our issue to make sure that, at least, our pickup would be there at the right time to get us, and our luggage, to the hotel.
Of course, having Viking plan your airfare comes with its perks as well. You don’t have to plan anything and their transport van/bus is right there to pick up you and your luggage and take you to your hotel if you booked a stay in town with Viking before the cruise or right to the ship if you didn’t.
And they return you to the airport when your cruise is done. As we didn’t have a local stay planned after our trip, just before, this means that we were being picked up extremely early in the morning (fortunately, we’re early risers) and being whisked off to a scheduled departure that seemed too close for comfort.
We found that when we got to the airport, Viking had a rep there whose job it was to expedite us through the airport to our plane.
Having traveled through CDG on my own previously, my internal response was, “well…I don’t need this.” But it turned out I DID! The Viking rep was great, talking to security, getting us in the right lines and making short work of getting us to our plane on time.
As I said before, I’d likely book our own airfare if we do it again and try to 1) get a continuous flight and 2) go several days ahead of the cruise schedule to be able to deal with issues of jet lag and travel sickness.
In this case, I MIGHT just book the stay in town on my own as well and then go from there to the cruise. Though planning our own stayover prior to the cruise does not include any excursions, I’ve found I have the best time, often, when I find my own things to do (though, I’ll admit, the wine and cheese night in Paris was fun).
Should I dress up on my Viking Cruise?
I overpacked, a bit, for this trip. My husband took advantage of the on-cruise laundry, but I came equipped with several dresses, along with some casual clothes.
On a Viking Cruise, there are no formal nights like on some large ocean cruise ships but, per their information, they encourage you to dress up for dinner.
But I found that many fellow cruisers were pretty casual at dinnertime. Sure, no cut-off shorts, but I saw plenty of women in capris and dressy tanks.
Fortunately, most of my dresses serve dual purposes and are ones that I wear on an everyday basis and can be dressed up or down as I see fit. My dressier dresses never saw the light of day.
Will I have room for all my stuff on my Viking Cruise ?
One thing I was concerned about was storage spage. Standard rooms aren’t huge but the closet and drawers were plenty large enough for us to put our clothes in and the closet included a small safe.
The beds in Viking Cruise staterooms are built with storage space underneath. As I was going to have someone else transporting my stuff on this trip, I didn’t pack light. My large suitcase, backpack, and Pelican 1510 case for my photo gear all fit under the bed and on my side of the bed.
Your fellow cruisers
Viking Cruise “longships” are small compared to a large ocean cruiser. While I’m not sure exactly how many cruisers were on our trip, on average a Viking river cruise will have around 190-200 passengers. So there’s opportunity to see the same people time and again — for better or worse.
Fortunately, I didn’t meet anyone I actively disliked and enjoyed the company of most of the people I did meet. My spouse did make the mistake of informing some new friends aboard the cruise that it was our anniversary and we ended up with a surprise combo stealth attack of a round of “It’s Now or Never” sung by the staff and a special surprise anniversary dessert which looked delicious but that we couldn’t eat after all of the other food. It went into the mini-fridge in our room.
My husband advocated for this, specific, cruise as I’d been learning French AND the cruise started on the day of our anniversary. However, it seems that your fellow cruisers will be fellow English speakers.
Aside from a couple of English couples and an Australian couple, most of the passengers were from the US.2 I tried addressing some of the servers in French, with one funny server saying, “Honey, I’m Iranian. You don’t need to speak French to me. I speak it, but (shrug).” Much of the serving staff were not French — not a complaint, just a fact. I couldn’t bug the capitain with my bad French, and didn’t want to make a pest of myself by following the cruise director around, either. I’d later have the opportunity to inflict my French on at least a few people in the villages we descended upon.
We’re well into middle age and were among the younger people on the ship. There was a young couple traveling with their family, and a few others that seemed to be our age or younger, but for the most part our fellow cruisers were retirees. One laughingly told me he was “practicing for assisted living.”
Cruising and illness
This could go for any cruise, not just Viking river cruises, and travel in general. Our cruise was in 2023 and though we took a COVID test pre-cruise, I don’t recall being asked for it with our documents at this point.
Being in such close proximity to other people on the plane, at meals, on the boat, on the tour bus can put you at risk for catching things.
One of our cruise friends who sat next to me appeared ill and was coughing but reassured me “she’d get over it,” and the man behind me on a long tour bus trip was hacking and popping cough drops the entire way. When I came home, I was sick — though not with COVID, fortunately. Somehow, my husband managed to avoid it.
Viking Cruise Excursions
Most stops along a Viking river cruise will have at least one included excursion and some that incur an extra cost.
We did a couple of paid ones and a few of the free excursions and then ended up mostly ditching the tours altogether.
There was nothing wrong with the tours, per se. The guides were friendly and knowledgable and the tours can be a great way to see some sights in a place if you don’t have much time.
But they are slow-moving, you have to mostly stay near your group, and the pace, crowds, and heat were and issue for my husband.
Some places, you’ll get just a sample of.
Take the Versailles for instance. I’d been to Paris by myself and had taken the train to Versailles and spent an entire day on the grounds there, but it was among the places my husband wanted to visit.
There was a Viking excursion available but we also discussed the possibility of, during our few days in Paris, taking the train out there on our own. This was well in advance of our trip, but I was sort of balking a bit just because we had limited time in Paris and on my previous trip, I’d needed to change my plans due to a train strike. So we decided to take the Viking Cruise excursion, with me cautioning him that there would likely not be time to do the things he dreamed of doing like renting a bike on the grounds.
There certainly was not. We took the tour through the main part of the chateau and got to glimpse and take a few photos of the grounds, but that was it. “Is that all?” he asked. Of course it was all. The grounds of Versailles are immense. An afternoon tour wouldn’t, for instance, give you the time to see one of my favorite things there: Marie Antoinette’s farm.
Later, we’d go on a tour to Josephine’s house, Chateau de Malmaison, which was smaller in scale. While this felt less limiting than getting but a glimpse of Versaille, I would have spent more time there if I had not been on a group tour.
Our cruise went to Normandy and the bus trip out to the D-Day museum and beaches were worth it, and something we coudn’t have done on our own. We also enjoyed the wine and cheese night in Paris, which allowed us to get to know a few of our fellow cruisers before we departed on the ship.
Get off the ship!
Aside from the food and watching the scenery going by as the ship moved down the river, taking photos of birds, and talking about which riverside house in France we wanted to buy, my favorite activities were just getting off the boat and going into town sans-tour.
If you can, get off the ship and run around in town. Skip lunch aboard and seek out lunch in the little village where you just stopped. Go to a market. Take a stop in a cathedral or church. Some of my favorite memories of the trip were wandering into a quiet cathedral in the evening where we found a choir was practicing, walking around the orchard pathways and stopping at a boulangerie in a little riverside village, and walking up for an overhead view of the landscape from Chateau Guillard.
Daily Briefings
Viking Cruise requires you to attend a daily briefing or at least watch from the TV in your room.
Part of me balked at having to go to a meeting, but these are quite important. You need to know if they’re going to move the ship when you’re off the boat and in port. You don’t want to miss the boat! You’ll also get a daily itenerary. Make sure you read it and know what’s going on that day.
Accessibility
On our cruise, I noted that there was an elevator so passengers with wheelchairs or walkers could get between decks.
Viking doesn’t guarantee 100% accessibility, however, for special needs and anyone needing accomodations should check with them in advance.
I noted several passgengers utilizing, perhaps, a four wheeled walker onboard who needed a wheelchair for longer outings. In all cases that I could see, these people were traveling with a family member who was able to help on tours.
Some small villages, of course, have uneven pavement, cobblestones, and other features that may not be easily accessible by people with mobility devices.
On-board fitness
On our cruise, there were no fitness classes, yoga, etc. as you might find with one of the large ocean cruise companies.
The ship has an upper deck where you could walk or run around the perimeter and an area you could use for your own fitness practice if it’s available. One early morning when we went atop the ship to quietly watch the sunrise, we found a couple using that area for a recorded workout we labeled as “parkour fitness” (and made us feel bad for our slothfulness).
But, when you’re in port, if you’re like us you’ll put in lots of mileage walking.
Multi-cruising?
I was surprised — perhaps I shouldn’t have been — as I mentioned before, by the number of people who seemed to be taking back to back cruises.
In part, I was envious of this. Part of me sort of wanted to get off the ship or go home. If I ever I did this, I’d have to change the way I was eating and drinking (and maybe start doing parkour fitness on the top deck, too).
But if, in retirement, we had the funds and didn’t want to deal with the self-planned travel, I’d definitely consider this. At least you avoid having to fly back home, then return again later if you want to do a different cruise.
In Summary:
Would we do it again? My husband definitely wants to take another Viking river or ocean cruise — not necessarily in Europe, but somewhere.
Me? If he truly wants to do that, I won’t object. It was a good trip. But if I had a travel bucket list, I’ve now checked off, “Viking Cruise.” I love being on the water. But there are are so many places in the world to go, and so many ways to see them more affordably. Though, I’ll admit, way less luxiurously.
I’d recommend it if you love cruising, like luxury travel, want to be escorted around and toured, or aren’t able (or don’t like to) to do self-managed travel.
