Overall I'd rate the experience excellent, but it was our first river cruise experience. We were actually on the HERVOR, not the GERSMI. I was really impressed with our cruise director, Nancy. She was great, and always working on improving our experience. A few caveats though, our cruise was billed "Xmas Markets". But, most of the time they haven't opened when we arrive and only open for 30 minutes or so before we had to head back to the boat. Also learned, Christmas Markets are almost exclusively food and drink events. They are a great time, but if you are looking for Christmas Items, specifically locally made, you going to have to look pretty hard. Frankly, you have to find a "brick and mortar" store outside the markets, if you found Christmas items in market, they are exclusively produced in Asia. Also, wish they had explained that everything is closed on Christmas Day and Sundays. We should have realized that our Christmas Eve stop would be horribly crowded with last minute shoppers, just like here. The one big extra tour we booked to Alsace Wine tasting was cancelled at the last minute, that was very disappointing. The included port tours at each stop that Viking provided were pretty good. What we learned from this, is Christmas cruise isn't a great time to be on the river. We'll do other river cruises based on this experience, but I think we will pass on this window in the future. We did the add on pre-trip to Brussels and it was great, recommend that. One last significant negative, the wi-fi system on the boat was very poor/non-existent. The only reliable place to get wifi on the ship was in the lounge. It was not working in the rear of ship, specifically our room for the whole trip. We asked the staff about this, they said its just the way it is. I don't believe that. Granted I'm on vacation, but I do expect at least basic access to the internet on a cruise of this quality/expense. The Viking Voyager App we were provided with, only works when connected to ship board wifi, So you can only use it in the lounge, and frankly they never updated it so it was useless anyway. Unless Viking puts some effort into this, I wouldn't bother loading it.