Viking Rinda Review
Rating by category
Additional details
• Background information My wife has been to Europe many times and was intrigued by the boats plying the beautiful rivers. I have never been to Europe and we wanted my first visit to include a lot of different places without a lot of stress. We somehow got a Viking brochure and quickly agreed to book the Grand European Tour after I retired.
We booked directly with Viking and were very impressed when the Viking representative suggested a less expensive cabin than we were first considering. As it turned out, everything he told us was quite correct.
This was our first cruise of any kind and we were impressed with the materials Viking sent us before the trip. Our itinerary, guidebooks, luggage tags and name badges arrived in nice zippered cases.
Cabin Review
The ship has three decks. The cabins on the lowest deck have windows just above the water level. Our room (215) was on the middle deck and had a veranda. We loved the room and kept the drapes open as much as possible so that we could enjoy the scenery as the boat glided through the water. Our cabin was extremely quiet and wonderfully clean. Housekeeping came twice a day and was excellent. Some of the new friends we made had rooms on the lowest deck. One of those couples said that they heard a lot of noises in their cabin. We noted that the people on the lowest level seemed to spend more time than we did in the public spaces. When going through the many locks, the boat did bump the sides now and again. These bumps were apparently louder and more noticeable on the lowest deck. The cabins do have some 110-volt American style electric outlets so charging gizmos was no problem. The WiFi signal in our room was weak. The laptop we had along would connect, but my iPhone rarely was able to get even one bar. The signal was strong in the public areas so this was not a big problem for us although a few people were grumbling about the WiFi. The TVs in the room did not have many channel options, but that was fine with us because we rarely turned the TV on. The TV screen did not go completely black when turned off. We did hear some people grumble about that too, but it was not a big deal to us after the crew explained that it is just the way it is. The bath was small (as we expected), but it was also very cleverly designed so we had no problems showering. We had plenty of room to put away our clothing and we stored our bags under the bed. Some fellow passengers complained that they did not have enough drawer space but it was unclear to us if they had less space than we did or if they had brought more stuff. We had made a concerted effort to pack light. We used the retractable clothesline in the shower to dry clothing. We also brought a few hooks on suction cups that we attached to the glass shower doors so that we would be able to hang up all of our clothing to dry.