After taking a Viking River cruise in 2019, I never imagined I would ever give Viking a less than 5 star review but the recent Viking Cruise we took was just not good and left my husband and I feeling like Viking should just stick to River Cruises. To start with, I diligently filled out all requested paperwork online on the My Viking Journey website, as well as downloaded the ArriveCAN app and VERIFLY. We also had electronic copies of our negative Covid test results taken within 72 hours of our arrival flight. Once everything was filled out properly, I received an email back from Viking with copies of our boarding passes. I thought this was great and that it would make the boarding process quick and easy. Wrong. We still had to show paper copies of everything that I had electronically downloaded into the various apps and websites (which they acknowledged receiving) and then, after showing them my vaccine cards, I had to fill out a form listing all of the same vaccine information. I understand and absolutely appreciate that they require all guests to be vaccinated, but I don't understand why I had to show up with a negative test result and the very first thing you are required to do before boarding is take another Covid test. All in all, the check-in process was very disorganized and even a little chaotic. The couple we traveled with were delayed over a half an hour during check-in due to an issue about their cabin number??

My next biggest complaint was the optional excursion to Alcatraz which supposedly included a bus tour that we paid $129 per person for. The tour guide on our bus was absolutely terrible. He didn't know how to use the audio system and just seemed to ramble on without giving us any useful information, then finally had to turn the audio system off because the feedback was killing us. The bus then pulled up to city hall and he announced that we could step outside the bus to take pictures in front of the building. Not one person on the bus had any interest in getting off to take pictures of this building. Of all the landmarks we could have seen, this was ridiculous. When we finally pulled up to the area where we were to catch the ferry to Alcatraz, we were 2 BLOCKS from the cruise ship, at which point we were told there isn't a bus ride back to the ship as it's so close. No problem for us, but there were a lot of elderly people on this cruise and what if there had been anyone that couldn't walk 2 blocks? This was pretty shady on Viking's part to not make it clear from the beginning that we were only 2 blocks away from the ferry. We would never have paid $129 to take a miserable bus ride right back to where it picked us up so that we could go to Alcatraz where tickets are only $41. They took us for a ride alright! Fortunately, Alcatraz didn't disappoint.

Food and drinks: the bar tenders were very inconsistent and I was surprised at how bad some of the drinks we ordered were. I ordered a cosmopolitan that was served to me in a margarita glass, was less than half full, and was just terrible. I've never had to send a drink back in my life but it was just ridiculously bad. It's great that beer and wine are included with lunch and dinner, but if you eat in the World Cafe they were very slow about serving drinks. This included juice and coffee in the morning. The food was good, but that's it; just good, not great. It was no where as great as the food we had on their river cruise. Very disappointing and not what we expected from Viking. Read more