After hearing so much about the benefits of river cruising we thought we would give it a go and selected the Uniworld Soane/Rhone wine country cruise. The cruise itself was very good to excellent. Ship was in good condition and very clean, only exception was tile in our shower that was quite grotty - made no sense when rest of ship was so clean. Crew and staff we friendly and helpful. Food was very good and nice size portions. The local wine served with meals was all excellent. Dining room service was a bit spotty, wondered at one point if they were short crew. Would agree with a previous reviewer that cliques formed quickly, tougher to mix, mingle and meet new people at dinner than we had experienced on other cruises or land tours.

On board entertainment was geared to the over 90 set. I am sure the individual artists were very talented but Uniworld is obviously not targeting fit and active baby boomers.

Overall I expected better / more from the excursions. We had some excellent guides but we also had a couple of real duds and for what we paid they all should have been top notch. We ended up buying the supplemental tours as we quickly realized that if we did not, there was nothing to do in the afternoon other than sit around the ship, which I am sure is fine for many travellers, but not us. All the supplemental tours were excellent both in content and guides. Included tours were a mix, but the common denominator was that they were all low impact, stair and hill avoidance and in the case of the trip to Les Baux rushed. Read more