We have done many ocean cruises with several different companies, but this was our first river cruise with Viking on the ship Alsvin for the Cities of Light cruise from Paris to Prague. If you like a very structured, well organized cruise this is an excellent cruise. If you like to visit cities on your own, visit friends, or like a lot of free time at each location do not take this cruise. Your opportunities will be extremely limited.

Reservations: The Viking travel agent we worked with provided no detailed information despite multiple requests. She kept referring to the general itinerary shown on the web site. She could not tell us the general time of day (morning, afternoon, evening) the ship arrived and departed from each stop or approximately how long we would be at each stop. As a result it was impossible to coordinate meeting with friends. Fortunately we found a general itinerary published on another travel agency web site that provided this information.

Air reservations: Because we extended our stay at each end of the trip we chose the air deviation option so we could select our flights. Air reservations has a separate phone number from regular reservations so make sure you ask your travel agent for this number to discuss air travel issues. They were amazing and provided everything we asked for. My only complaint is they did not provide seats for us on the flight from Prague to Amsterdam with KLM. We were told we had to do this ourselves and KLM wanted to charge us for the early seat selection. If you pay extra money for the travel agency to schedule your flights then all costs and seat selections should be included and you should not have to make arrangements yourself. A few days before departure, we spoke to KLM and they gave us seats without an extra charge. The other problem was that our flight schedule changed five times before we departed and Viking did not notify us of all the changes. The only way we found out was to check our reservations regularly on the airline web site. Read more