A few years ago my wife and I embarked on a couple of River Cruises on the Nile in Egypt. The boats were old and in need of some updating but nevertheless very clean with excellent staff and food. We thoroughly enjoyed these cruises which truly were river cruises where for most days we sat on the sun deck watching the excellent scenery pass slowly by. My wife though had always wanted to cruise the Danube. The Viking commercials are very enticing and we thought we would have a wonderful trip. Unfortunately, reality did not meet our expectations. First and foremost let me state that the Viking boats are excellent with good crew and lovely food. We had a verandah stateroom which was excellent although we had very little opportunity to use the verandah due to the reality of this cruise. But that is as good as it gets. We were expecting to sit up top and watch the countryside glide past us but in fact most of the cruising is carried out overnight in order to get to the next port so we saw very little of the surrounding countryside. After leaving Budapest in the evening we awoke the next morning heading for the first lock. Above the lock we then travelled for about 30 Km on a man made canal high above the surrounding featureless countryside with the Danube somewhere in the distance before re-entering the Danube just south of Bratislava. The only true river cruising was one afternoon through the Wachau Valley which was beautiful and I suspect is used for their commercials. The biggest issue I have is that we were told the boat would have to go into dry dock at Linz to resolve a problem (unknown). We were told this quite late even though Viking must have known about the dry docking earlier. We were given a choice of staying on the boat in dry dock with no power or facilities and only the public toilets in use or just leave the boat and left to ourselves. The very least Viking should have done is arrange an outing for us as we had already toured the city in the morning. I put this to the Manager and she promised to speak to Head Office that evening. Despite ample opportunity to come back to me I had instead to chase her for an answer which was that Head Office would do nothing for us but that Customer Service would be in contact with me. They have not! Overall, for the price we had to pay, this cruise was a disappointment and certainly did not reach our expectations.