Our trip began with an email while we were in transit to Romania. The email informed us that the two days to the Black Sea (the highlight if the cruise) had been cancelled due to low water. At 11:00pm, we received a note under our door advising us that we would be leaving the hotel (Palace Hilton) we had two nights at we had paid for to relocate to a cheaper hotel (the Pullman). We had an extra day before the cruise began and had scheduled a private tour to Dracula's Castle. Our cruise director advised us that we could not leave our luggage, because he would not accept responsibility for it. We almost had to cancel our private tour, because of their "decision" to move us from a room we had paid for for two nights. Fortunately our private tour guide (not affiliated with Avalon) allowed us to take all of our luggage with us. We were given a choice to cancel the tour with a full refund, but would still have to pay for the airfare to and from Bucharest as well as having to make our own air travel arrangements. I would suggest you take the extra day in Bucharest and travel to Brasau and Bran Castle which is so etching not covered (even as an option by Avalon).

We spent an extra day in Bucharest due to the low water and the city tour was OK. The next days drive was 8 hours on a bus to a port in Romania on the Danube that was substandard. We got into our stateroom (Category B) and it was OK. The brochure led us to believe we had a balcony with our room that could seat up to 6 people...NOT TRUE! The "balcony" was a rail outside of sliding glass door and we were advised "not to open the sliding glass door" after doing it once which led to the air conditioning not working and a open door would fill up the cabin with bugs. I will credit the engineer with a fast response to repairing the AC. The Danube where we boarded was not pleasant, since we observed a lot of raw sewage in the river.

The first two ports on our cruise were poor (they replaced the ones we couldn't go to because of low water). Parts of the cruising were OK. We liked going through the "Iron Gates" and we had one good local tour guide (in Belgrade) that made the city interesting. The cities of Belgrade, Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna were nice visits. We would have liked to explore Bratislava more and the guide we had talked too much, while it would have been better if she told us where to meet after a brief tour and allowed us to go off on our own. Read more