CannyScotTor

@molymoo, fair enough, I should have put emergency in quotes, but to be fair, Viking does refer to their in-transit help line as an “emergency “ phone number. Be that as it may, the point is that their help desk wasn’t very helpful. I know that there were earlier flights available on Viking partner airlines, but they weren’t prepared to switch flights for us. BTW the agent that gave us new boarding passes represented the airline (nothing to do with Viking’s air department). The reason we missed our connection was due to our flight leaving almost two hours late due to a mechanical problem, so the airline was at fault.

On our recent cruise, we missed our connection at Heathrow. Our airline had an agent at the arrival gate who gave us new boarding passes for a later flight, eight hours later. I called the Viking emergency number and asked if they could try to get us an earlier flight. They said that once we were in transit, it was up to the airline to arrange an alternative flight, and there was nothing they could do. They did send an email to their transfer department to make sure there was someone there to take care of us when we arrived, but that was it. We were most disappointed, essentially they didn’t do anything to help us with our emergency. YMMV

Oh, and another thing. The instructions they provided state that, on disembarking, you should pick up your bags and contact their agent in the baggage collection area. There was no agent. Viking placed our bags in the “untagged” bags area rather than in our assigned colour coded area. After a lot of confusion a Viking agent assured us that the bags would be collected later by fedex. This was in Barcelona, and apparently is the standard practice there. Don’t know about other ports.

In my experience, the tracking provided by luggage forward is pretty lame. it tells you the last city where your bags were tracked, that’s it. On our return trip from our cruise, our bags were not marked as having been picked up until three days after fedex had actually picked them up. (The status indicated the bags had not yet been picked up, but the last tracked location was in a different city). Our two bags were delivered to our home on different days, but the tracking data on their website didn’t reflect this at all. IMO What the really need, is to provide a link to the tracking data of the company actually shipping the bags, fedex, ups, dhl, or whatever , which is much more detailed.

OneSixtyToOne, yes I understand that you can place air tags in checked luggage, however, luggage forward explicitly forbids then in their shipped luggage, I have no idea why.

If you read their terms of service, you’ll find that you are not allowed to place airtags in your luggage (lithium ion batteries are forbidden). In fact, the list of things that are prohibited is quite long. No liquids, gels, electronics, medicines, aerosols, medical devices (apparently a face mask is a medical device), batteries etc. So, you can’t put things like toothpaste, shampoo, hairspray, shaving cream, perfume, liquid makeup, hand sanitizer etc in your luggage. Given that these liquids and gels are also strictly limited in carry on luggage, how are you supposed to take them with you. We ended up having to check a bag with the airline containing these restricted items which kind of makes the idea of luggage forward less appealing. Also, it ain’r cheap. YMMV

If you have a flight connecting through a German airport on Friday, you should try and change your flight to connect through another country. The seven major airports in Germany will be in chaos due to a one day strike by security and ground staff. We just changed our flights to connect through Heathrow.

A word to the wise. Air Canada main line international business class is pretty good. However, Air Canada Rouge is their budget airline which I would personally avoid at all costs. I would carefully check which airline is actually operating the flight.