We chose Viking because we had a great experience with Viking three years ago on a Rhine cruise. The cabin was beautiful, but there was nightly work being done on the deck above our cabin that woke us up almost every night. We complained, but it still happened.

Also, upon boarding we had difficulty finding our cabin. When we boarded the river cruise, there was a crew member escorting every guest to their cabin. On the cruise ship, we were on our own and it was more difficult to find. Our cabin was in the front on the upper deck where only one set of elevators actually went to our floor. The restaurants were good, but choices were limited in some places. For example at the pool, it was the same menu every day. It would have been nice to have the restaurants feature foods from the area we were traveling. The only restaurant that did this was the World Cafe and that food was like cafeteria food. The staff, just like on the river cruise, was outstanding, the only difference was that they seemed over worked, and they talked about it. They were working long hours with short down time and they mentioned this to the passengers.

We had two problems with shore excursions. In Santorino Viking should not have allowed "leisure walkers" to go on the shore excursions. The hills were too severe and the sidewalks too uneven. The guide did her best, but a few people on our tour and a person we ate dinner with basically sat on the bus the whole time. When we were on the river cruise cruise, Viking had a modified versions of the daily tours for "leisure walkers" which were the over 55 and had difficulty walking, had walkers ,etc. In Dubrovnik we had a tour guide who was not sensitive to the over 55 crowd. In Dubrovnik they have their own currency and all of the public rest rooms required exact change with that currency. Having arrived just that morning and not knowing this several people on out tour needed to use the rest room and had no where to go. They ended up walking back to the ship and missing out on the rest of the tour. Sounds crazy, but it's a problem for the over 55 group. I would love to do more cruising with Viking, but it is too expensive. It's a special occasion cruise company for us. i'd like to see you stop mailing me so many catalogs. I'm in the direct mail business, so I know how expensive these are. I get a piece of Viking mail almost daily; some days multiple pieces, plus getting emails a couple days a week. Perhaps if you saved money with the mailings you could reduce the price of your cruises.