My wife and I are both in our early 50's and have never sailed Viking before. We signed up for this cruise about 2 months before after someone else must have cancelled. We have sailed with Royal Caribbean, Princess, and Oceania before but never Viking. We were not sure what to expect but since it was a new ship and the itinerary looked good we decided to give it a try. We did the Viking Homelands trip. After booking the trip the reviews started to come in on Cruise Critic and I became nervous I may have made a bad decision. The reviews started improving as our ship departure became close so I was a little less nervous. Overall, we had a great time. The ship is really nice, the crew are fabulous and the room was overall very good. The common areas are just lovely with sitting areas throughout, lovely furniture, and contemporary and peaceful places to sit. We enjoyed the changing large picture in the atrium and walked past it many times during the day to see what was shown.

We had a deluxe veranda stateroom 3049 which was on the lowest floor. The size of the room was similar to a balcony room on RCCl or princess. The storage was tight as there were only 3 small drawers and one shelf. The closet had an upper shelf where I kept most of my stuff. I did not like the way the two doors had to slide back and forth so when I went to my stuff my wife could not get to here things. Other than that the room was fine. There were two comfortable chairs and a desk. The bathroom was really nice with large shower and heated floors. The mirrors were treated with something to keep them from fogging which was great. The water temp as others have noted varied and it would get hot and cold all the time so it was hard to have a consistent water temp which seems odd for a new ship. The TV as others have noted did not work well at all. It would freeze during live tv, on demand did not always work, I had to call almost every day to have it restarted. There are only 6 live tv channels Fox news, MSNBC, BBC news, sky news, sky sport, prime us, and prime something else. There were many on demand free tv and movies which were mostly very old movies and the few we watched often would freeze during playback. The free wife was nice. As others noted the wifi was slow but again it was free. I could almost never send a video but could send pics and check email.

Food was overall very good. I would say it was better than Princess and Royal Caribbean but not as good as I was expecting given the price paid for this trip. The Italian (Manfriddis) was excellent and we had dinner there 5 times and the Chefs Table was also very good and we had dinner there 3 times. We did not have problems getting late reservations. Some people did not like the Chef's table but we enjoyed the meal. It is a set menu that now changes about every 5 days. It is basically 3 courses with 2 palate cleansing courses in between. The free wine and beer at meals was nice but I would have liked to have the wine at beer free all the time or at least at all venues during lunch and dinner hours. It was a pain to have to go to the restaurant for the drinks rather than at any of the bars. I enjoy drinking good wine and at first the wine was drinkable but they would change to different wine bottles after one would run out. So some of the wines were ok and others were very bad. At the first stop we went to the wine shops in port and bought several bottles to bring to the dinners and drink in the room. There is no corkage and they were very nice in getting us large glasses to drink our wine. The menu choices were usually good but breakfast was a little monotonous. I usually like to have smoked white fish in the morning as almost every cruise I have been on had this as an option but Viking only had lox and herring. The buffet was very clean and they would cook made to order omelets and other things at an open kitchen which was nice. The late night choices for food were very limited. After the restaurants were closed there was only one place for food and it was basically sliced meats. No late night desserts or cheeses to be found anywhere. The evening buffet did have crab legs and sushi choices. The sushi choices were the exact same rolls for 2 weeks straight. They were ok but not great. Read more