carmel.1111

Sorry, forgive my typos above. I was typing on my phone in a hurry 🙂

Friends, hear was our resolution - and many, many thanks for your thoughts and comments. I spoke yesterday to Viking General Customer Service, who confirmed we already did have Viking Air Plus with our reservation, which I did not know for sure. Therefore, we were still able to use that service even though we are under 30 days from our reservation. (I may be wrong, but I thought from the website description that if you didn’t already have ordered it 65 days out, you no longer had that service option.) Today I spoke with Viking Air Plus. The rep was extremely polite, if a bit skeptical of my late request. I did pull up on my own our preferred flight modifications and then requested to see if they were available through Viking, versus having him suggest flights, although I think he would have gone through the options verbally if I had preferred. In the end, I was able to add a connecting flight from our city to our original ORD to CDG reservation, then change our entire flight home to connect through DC (IAD) to home. The fare change differential fees were $172 each person. The Viking change fees were $350 each person. Worth it to us, given that this is otherwise a very generously gifted trip, but I understand these fees could easily have been avoided. According to my MIL, her TA told her we had to fly from Chicago, but two Viking reps told me the trip through our home city would have been the same “included air” deal my in laws paid for within our trip costs had it been designated as the destination city for us at the outset. If anyone wants to add thoughts onto this, please do, but I want to thank everyone again!

Thank you for the thoughts on this so far! I absolutely do not mind paying a change fee, I really just want to fly in and out of my home airport. So Viking Air Plus can still assist even though we are flying out sooner than 65 days? I honestly think it would have been so much simpler to book our own flights, but here we are. Once I personally had the info my understanding was they were already ticketed. Thank you again for any/ all thoughts!

All, his is my first cruise, which my in laws have generously paid for for my husband and me. We are doing a cruise in France at the end of October/ start of November and I have a couple of very basic questions about the air piece. They booked us flights to Paris from Chicago. However, we do not live in Chicago, and I want to add flights before and after from our hometown to Chicago, at our expense, to and back, so we do not land and have to drive several hours home. From my understanding, I am too close to our trip to use Viking Air for this? The only reason I ask is that I have travelled internationally many times, but always booked all legs of my journey together, so if something was delayed everything was linked and taken care of. If I find and book these flights separately I assume we just deal with any delays directly when we land if anything does go wrong, but how does that work if our other flights were booked through Viking (I.e., if we are delayed leaving Paris I assume Viking will help us rebook that leg, but then we’d have to separately deal with the second flight?) Also I assume there would be no way to check my bag through to PRI’s from my original departure point but we’d collect at O’Hare and check it again on the way out, or is there a way to link these reservations if we use the same airline? Please excuse likely dumb questions, but I’ve only ever booked my own travel before, and I have just been delayed many, many times on international flights and am trying to be proactive.