Western Caribbean Expedition Cruises Reviews

This review is primarily for people contemplating Viking Expeditions Panama and Scenic South America cruise. This is only my opinion. We are frequent cruisers and habitual Viking Ocean customers (1 river and 7 Viking Ocean cruises). We booked this one as it was relatively inexpensive for a lot of days (18) on a new Expedition class ship. We wanted to experience it and decide if we would invest in ...

We chose this trip from Santiago Chile through the Panama Canal to Ft. Lauderdale because we wanted to try an Expedition ship and I don't like cold weather. Everything is geared towards the Arctic however and there really wasn't much to do on the ship. We had a nature lecturer and a historian but the talks were mostly on the Arctic. The "toys" on board are only licensed to be used in Antarctica ...

We wanted to see Maya sites and wanted to try Ponant. We have sailed on Cunard, Celebrity, Oceania, Windstar, Seabourn, Holland America and Viking - 20+ cruises in all, 6 on Seabourn. I would say 80-90 percent of the passengers spoke French as their primary language. We enjoyed that. The officers are French, the staff Indonesian or Filipino. We were rather taken aback to see the captain ...

We had such hopes for this trip. The ship & itinerary fit our needs on paper but in reality we were disappointed with the execution of this cruise. Not only did embarkation change from Puerto Morelos to Cozumel after booking our flights but the trip was advertised to include diving in Honduras. On boarded we learned Puerto Cortes was a dirty shipping port with no diving. The water was green ...

Le Champlain is a lovely ship with only ninety-two cabins, 165 passengers and 115 crew members. We felt the on-board experience was excellent in almost every respect and were impressed that most crew members knew us by name, or at least by cabin number and preferences midway through the cruise. Ponant has had difficulties with the local Mexican government and they have been unable to embark ...

It sounded close enough to the US, but varied, with 5 days aboard and 5 days ashore. What no one at National Geographic or Lindblad told me was that this was the inaugural trip; worse yet was that the trip had not been tested on anyone. I paid an inordinate amount, retail, no discount, to be someone's guinea pig. So, I still, after three months, have a really bad taste in my mouth because I've ...