This was our first river cruise and we loved it. The boarding process was easy as could be. We enjoyed the food a great deal. Other guests were extremely friendly and we found new friends to dine with over the course of the cruise. There were many choices at each mail and the service staff were beyond excellent in their friendliness and attentiveness. If one is vegetarian or vegan, this could be a relatively boring trip in terms of meals as the range of options seemed quite small. It may be larger if one identified to the chef as vegan as I suspect they would make some efforts to create something special, but I do not know that for a face.

Each day offered an included excursion. These were usually a couple of hours and gave us a sense of the place we were visiting and then plenty of time to explore the city on our own. The excursions were usually walking tours and we divided into small groups, making it much easier to navigate. Our guides typically were folks native to the area and were all quite good. The headsets Viking uses made it easy to hear, even if we were not directly looking at our guide.

The staff at the front desk were excellent except when it came to having them serve as a concierge. We asked for help with dinner prior to a concert in Vienna. But, the choices they came up with did not work at all, based on what we requested. We just finally just asked for help in making a reservation at a place we selected from a Rick Steves guidebook. Viking apparently used to have a specialized concierge on these boats but ended up merging those functions with the front desk services. I think this was a big mistake and I predict they will reverse this soon as it did not work on our ship. Read more