We chose this cruise as we always wanted to cruise the Rhine and visit the Christmas markets. We chose Viking as we saw their offering from their numerous TV adverts.

Overall the vessel and most of the crew were very good. The food was of a very good standard and the itinerary of stops were including many interesting and enjoyable locations.

How sad it was, then, to find that our Veranda suite, one of the more expensive cabins on board, suffered from an issue which caused our cruise to be ruined. The airflow system is positioned right above the bed, and issues a loud blowing noise permanently, and this caused us to only get a few short hours of interrupted sleep each night. We tried stuffing towels in the outlet but this did not really help. We complained each day to the hotel desk reception, but they seemed disinterested. Eventually we had the ships engineer visit and he confirmed it was a known issue on these vessels in these types of cabin. We also had the Hotel Manager visit, and he noticed the loud bedroom airflow noise whilst in the lounge area. However, he told us we were the only customers to complain and we must be over sensitive to the noise! The noise level was so bad we almost left the vessel halfway through the cruise as we were suffering from sleep deprivation, and my wife was in tears each night.We bought earplugs in Cologne to try to reduce the impact. Read more