ingo_e

The canal is still closed at Erlangen (between Bamberg and Nuremberg). So ships going Budapest - Nuremberg only are not affected.

The Freya is stuck under the bridges north of Nuremberg (close to Erlangen, where Viking disembarks on their Nuremberg - Budapest Cruises). The Main Danube canal is closed since yesterday, but only ships going Nuremberg - Bamberg are affected.

The local newspaper covers the story as well, for updates check: http://www.nordbayern.de/

I don't think we are looking at another 2013 situation. There were some severe local floodings, and at the moment levels are rising. But it's mainly surface washoff, while in 2013 we had heavy rain for weeks.

A few cruises won't make it from Passau to Regensburg tomorrow, I don't know about the weekend yet. Will keep you informed

Today was the first day since the low water issues started (3-4 weeks ago? i can't remember ;) ) when a Viking long ship (the Atla) left Nuremberg for Regensburg. While I was really happy about everything going back to 'normal', some of the PAX complained (!!!) about rain and the cold weather during the city tour ruining their cruise experience.. :eek:

We had some rain in Nuremberg (north of the water divide but close) as well, this morning is cloudy. But to be on the safe side we would need 2-3 days of rain and moderate temperatures..

A taxi from the ships docking location to the ralley grounds costs around 15€. Walking around the Zeppelinfield is for free, last admission to the Dokumentationcenter is at 5pm

The RMD locks (the bottleneck for AMS - Black Sea) are 190x12m, so 11.40 is the maximum width (i'd say 11.60 is some typo). The interesting question is rather, why the ship length are standardized to 110m / 135m

I would much prefer to be notified further in advance than any of the lines are doing, since I would already be in Europe a week or two before a river cruise and would be able to switch plans to a DIY trip rather than any chance of a bus trip.

Well, often they do not know in advance how a situation is going to develop. The long term high water during May 2013 (+ the time it took to repair all the locks in June 2013) was the total exception from the rule. Rather often it is a question of a few cm clearance height IF a boat can pass a bridge or if the water is already too high. Usually PAX stay on their boat and do one or two cities per bus, while the boat catches up asap.

Keep in mind, about 1-2 weeks after the river levels are better and everything is back to normal, there will be another 'wave' of ship switches. Because of the delay atm the ships are not where they are supposed to be, so the companies will get them back on schedule. So another 'sideeffect' of a low / high water situation is, it might also affect PAX on the next cruises.

Two days ago we received a warning about possible low water issues on the Danube between Passau and Regensburg. Yesterday we had some tours at Nuremberg where the PAX had to disembark at Vilshofen for their city tour.

Weather is hot and sunny, thunderstorms expected this weekend (no rain until then), we will see how the situation develops. Try to keep you up to date later, gotta go to work.

Uniworld is not the only company blocking certain ports or services. E.g. some time ago I was on some ship (forgot which one :/ ) and tinkered around with their internet connection. In their case I was able to ssh and use other services, but they blocked youtube streams (while the youtube page did work otherwise).

The bottle neck is the outgoing connection to the satellite. Basically they will use one (or several bundled) LTE connections as an uplink. So even under best cirrcumstances, you are sharing 100mbit/s with 150 pax + 40 crew members. I ran a few ping tests while waiting and being bored and the packet loss and ping time was *not the best* while docked. Now think about the ships moving, locks and bridges causing less visibility to satellites, 3G instead of LTE in rural stretches along the river.. These are some of the 'external problems', which are the reason for these cruise line policies..

I don't think it will change soon. The companies try to provide some basic internet access for everyone, but it won't be enough for power users. :/

Usually they are published over Q1 / the year before. So in this case somewhat around January - March 2016

Hi, I tried to gather information about official warning levels from all european agencies, but the feedback was close to nothing. So I just use simple boxplots charts to see if a level is in the upper or lower quartiles for this month / overall, use it here: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/river-levels. I will include it in the app later this year, but have a lot of work to do as main season started :)

Rhone and Saone seems fine at the moment.

'Fun' fact: about 8-12% of all bombs dropped did not explode, e.g. for Nuremberg we expect about 3500 UXOs hidden in the underground.

10 on the Rhine plus the 1 on the Juliana Canal to Amsterdam. The Rhine locks are all upstream of Mainz / Mayence.

The Danube has a total of 19 locks, 16 of them are between Regensburg and Budapest. About 10 of them are in Austria.

The Viking Ve, by the way, is one of the "baby" longships. She was only christened in March.

notamermaid: are you sure about the "baby longship" ? I think I saw her some days ago in Nuremberg and she looked like all the other long ships. Also 180-200 PAX sounds like the regular longships like odin, idun and the others.. To my knowledge the baby longships were only build for the Elbe river.

If I learned anything from working as a guide for 8 years in the river cruise industry now, I would never bet money on water levels. In 99% of the cases they are fine and no issues, but things might change in 2-3 days. And a high (-er than average) level now does not mean anything for what might be the situation in 2 weeks, not to mention August..

The Elbe is a bit low (for this season), but still fine compared to the overall median :)

I know, had the same issue when doing research for my masters paper years ago. But in this case it is not important, as a castle remains a castle (though it was built in 1304 instead of 1502) and not a football stadium :)

I just wanted to let you know that I (nearly) finished another great feature for cruise research: I scanned the wikipedia database for pages with GPS coordinates and checked if they are located within one of the city boundary boxes. The result are about 15.000 wikipedia pages about points of interests in 500 cities. I still have to do some fine tuning on mediawiki, but wanted to present the result already now:

Amsterdam: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c...ci_id=3#tabs-5

Budapest: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c...i_id=35#tabs-5

Nuremberg: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c..._id=144#tabs-5

Prague: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c..._id=159#tabs-5

Paris: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/city-index?ci_id=148

(Edit: I forgot, the full list of all cities that were listed on cruise itineraries over the last years (and the upcoming season) can be found here: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/city-index )

If you click on one of the pages, a local wiki opens up and displays the text. Of course, some smaller cities do have only one or two pages, but I think you get an idea. There are still a few hick ups, like missing pictures and wiki templates for info boxes, but I am working on that and think I'll have everything fixed over the course of this month. Depends a bit on how many extra hours I have to work due to the high water issue :(

Last year, I asked for your help to create a list of categories in order to tag cruises & cities. Originally I had intended to tag all wiki pages myself, but I actually was surprised to end up with so many points of interest, facing 15.000 pages it is just not possible to tag them all by hand. Hence I already added some automatization for searching and tagging pages based on keywords. But I am not sure if I missed something, so this is where I would like to do some crowdsourcing and ask for your help.

Whats the gain? At the moment, you can already use the wiki (beta version) for research for your upcoming cruise, for this we don't need any keywords. But there are no limits in what we can use this for (and the implementation is rather simple), let me just give you a two use cases that came to my mind:

• Include it in a search mask: Lets say, you are interested in a food, music and arts cruise but don't want to hear anything about World War 2. Easy, as we got the connection from Keywords -> Categories -> Wiki Page -> City -> Cruise Itinerary
  
• Compare different cruises: How about you have narrowed your choice down to two cruises, same length, same rivers, and they share about 80% of the cities on the itinerary. Now we can easily see how big the difference would be, how the other 20% of the ports of call shift the overall storyline of the cruise.
  

For starters I already filled the script with a few dozen keywords and it works like a charm. However I don't consider myself to be an expert in all fields. Hence this post, it would be really great if you participate and do some brainstorming. Write down any termes, names or verbs you associate with the following categories:

1 Art

2 Music

3 Food

4 Nature

5 Sports

6 Religion

7 Meet the locals

8 Ancient History

9 Medieval History

10 Renaissance

11 Baroque

12 19th Century

13 World War 1

14 World War 2

15 Jewish History

16 Cold War

17 Contemporary History

18 Military History

19 Technology

20 Agriculture

21 Photo Opportunities

Some keywords may fit in several categories, so don't hesitate to list them multiple times – e.g. “Roman Legion” would be a keyword for the Category “Ancient History” as well as “Military History”. Don't worry about false positives, I can filter them out later on thanks to the magic of statistics :) The script is case insensitive, so ignore upper and lower cases (but special characters like germanic umlaut or french accents need to be mentioned extra).

I would suggest the easiest way would be if we use the following syntax for each category:

Category Name: Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword 3...

You don't need to write down hundreds of keywords (or add keywords for all categories). Of course, the more the better, but that is the beauty of swarm intelligence and crowdsourcing: If everyone just adds 3-7 keywords per category (which doesn't take long), we'll end up with an impressive total number. You would take a lot of work of my shoulders and I have more time to spend on other upcoming features, like the implementation of the two examples I gave and some more cool stuff I am finishing up right now (a weather import script e.g.)

Thank you very much for your help and have a nice sunday!

Ingo

The problem in Passau is the low suspension bridge, when the Danube is over 6.3 meters (as it is now), boats with large/high superstructure can not proceed under the bridge.

To my knowledge, ships are stuck at Vilshofen / Deggendorf because of the old railway bridge at Regensburg. Groups today will reach Nuremberg by bus, have not heard anything about tours tomorrow or for this weekend..

More bad news, also the Danube seems to be closed between Passau and Regensburg. The river level at Deggendorf went from 3.50 to 5.00m in 2 days.. What a great season start :(

Jeb: Glad to be of help.. But actually I don't know, some are absolute levels, some are relative levels above minimum, so what I already compiled for the website is a check if the level is rather high (or low) for this month / in general: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/river-levels . I am planning to include that in the app later this year, but at the moment I am finishing up a different project

Marigold252: Thanks for mentioning my app, but the URL is wrong.. rivercruiseinfo.com - or for the unpatient, here are the direct links:

ios (iphone + ipad): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/river-cruise-info/id610398042?mt=8&uo=4

android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.appdream.rivercruise