Emerald Star Review
Rating by category
Additional details
This was our first river cruise and we loved every aspect of it! It was not as hectic as I feared it would be, with lots of variety and many options as to how we spent our time. This made for a relaxing yet extremely interesting 7 days. For example, we appreciated having the option of taking out the bicycles at certain ports (in addition to a day where we enjoyed a 32 km ride through the wine country of Austria.) In Budapest, we decided on the spur of the moment to go for a bike ride to Elizabeth Island before the evening meal. Another activity we were glad we decided to do was spending an afternoon with a local Slovakian family on our day in Bratislava. This was delightful.
The food was wonderful. It was nice to have a mixture of the buffets for breakfast and lunch, and served meals for dinner. We had been on three ocean cruises previously but preferred the small ship with 175 people compared to spending a week with 3000 or more fellow travellers.
Should we go another river cruise, we would definitely choose Emerald again.
Cabin Review
Everything was meticulously clean. Our only complaint was that it was somewhat noisy being on the lower level. There was a constant sound that apparently was the necessary "vacuuming" of the sanitation system. This was not a big problem as we did not really spend much time in the room other than sleeping, especially since we did not have much of a view from the small window. Our preference was to not pay extra for the nicer rooms on the levels above us, which made for a very reasonably priced cruise.