Just did Beijing to Hong Kong (October 2019). The Viking Orion is a beautiful machine, and the crew is superb. The food quality, preparation, and presentation are not good. Many of the meat dishes were not edible. The talk of the ship was: 'how can the #1 cruise line put out such a poor food product?' Guests who were staying on the ship for more ports in Asia were plotting pizza delivery to the ship.

Particularly striking was the excellence of the non-food crew who were uniformly excellent. The ship remained perfectly on schedule. The passenger interfaces were excellent. The excursions were a 50-50 kind of thing -- half good and half poorly executed. In hindsight, I should have gone with recommendations from Trip Advisor. Particularly vexing was a repeated plan of dropping guests in some site that deserved ten minutes and saying 'we will have one hour free time now'.

Cannot imagine that Viking can retain such a high rating with such poor food service!