This review has been published on Tripadvisor as well. My husband and I took 15 days Grand European tour in September 2016 (9/25/16-10/10/16). This was the first river cruise for us and many years dream of mine. First of all I need to say that we were very impressed by Vikings operation. I am giving them for that 5+. We knew that we would have to switch ships a few days before our trip so there was no surprise there. The surprise was how it was implemented. In the morning we put our suitcases outside of the cabin with tags provided by crew, boarded buses and were off to the Cologne center. Our walking tour brought us down to the river where our new ship was waiting for us. Our suitcases were already in our cabins! That was incredible! So easy and painless. Viking has a lot of information on their website and also kept us informed by email. Please do your research and you would have a great time. I broke review by a few sections for easy access to the particular info you are interested in and yes, it is very long and I didn't say everything I wanted to say. Here we go:

Booking: it was a spontaneous decision to take this cruise due to exceptional price. Sydney from Viking found one cabin available at the end of September. All other dates were already booked and we didn't want to go later than that. We decided to pay extra $50.00 per person to choose the flights we like. It was very easy - we had a direct overnight flight to Amsterdam and 1:30 pm flight from Budapest back to Washington, DC through Munich. We were so glad we did this when we found out that many people had to leave ship around 4 am to catch the flight!!

Arrival: Flight was uneventful and Viking representative was right there at the gate when we arrived to Amsterdam. She brought us to the waiting area and told us that she has two more couples to meet and it will take 15 min to wait. No problem. One couple was from our flight and the other one showed up in 10 min. Viking rep brought us to the comfortable Mercedes van and they whisked us to our Viking Vili ship. The location was perfect - right in the city center next to the Centraal Train station. Read more