STAY AWAY FROM VIKING RIVER CRUISES. THEY ARE INTENTIONALLY DISHONEST AND WILL CHEAT YOU IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG. Here is what happened to us. We just returned from what was intended to be a 7-day Danube Waltz cruise from August 5-12, 2018. The day we arrived in our embarkation port, Budapest, we got an email from Viking telling us that low water levels prevented the boat from getting there and we would have to be bussed to our boat in Bratislava. We learned later that Viking knew about the water issues over a month before we arrived, but of course never told us because they wanted us locked into their hot mess of a cruise so we couldn’t demand a full refund before we flew to Europe. When we finally got to the boat and a shortened stay in Bratislava, we had only 1 night cruising. The next morning they told us the generator broke down. We had no toilets and menu items were unavailable since the kitchens were down as well. They told us to use the public restrooms on the boat docked next to us. We also had a high pitched screech in our room from midnight until about 3:30 AM and the room smelled like old socks. We spent several hours on a bus each way to see the Abbey in Krems. Never got to see the town, and the next day were told the generator couldn’t be fixed and we’d be bussed to our disembarkation port of Passau. We spent 6 hours on a bus. They did stop so approximately 100 of us could pay to use the restrooms in a gas station. Then they put us up in a hotel 30 miles outside of town. We got a letter shoved under our hotel room door the night before the “cruise” ended telling us we’d get 25% of the base fare back. Because this didn’t include airfare and our extension in Prague, we got back $1,724 after spending more than $12,000 on this trip. Viking’s concealment of the low water levels was intentionally deceptive – commonly referred to as fraud. This was our worst cruise experience on many levels. Viking is only concerned about its bottom line. It cannot be trusted. We wrote a letter to the Chairman and got no further compensation or apology.
Response from VikingS, Community Team
Our cabin smelled like old socks or dirty vacuum cleaner bags and really bothered my wife's allergies. When the toilets went out because of the broken generator we had a high pitched squeal in our room from midnight to 3:30 am.