Pushka

We did the Juneau Glacier Landing trip 2 weeks ago. Fabulous. Temsco Helicopters.

We used Glacier Wind Charters a couple of weeks ago and can recommend.

It was indeed. But poor service in a restaurant in Orion anyway seems to be a sign of the ship management of some issues and not just the restaurant. Orion failed in delivering proper tender service in Alaska and where we had three tender ports, including an awful embarkation process in Vancouver where we had no port, suggests systemic failure in some kinds of areas on this ship.

I certainly have given them lots of feedback about the entire trip organisation but haven’t heard anything back other than a “sorry”. It wasn’t a well organised trip at all from Vikings perspective although Alaska was stunning. But with a very delayed embarkation at 6pm, three tender ports of five visited plus a very poorly organised tender process delaying us getting off the ship for 2 hours after arrival then a short port time, it has put us off Viking completely to be honest. And I’ve also told them that. Everyone onboard kept saying “this is not the Viking we’ve come to love”. We loved Chefs Table.

We could only get an 8pm booking which was fine and we arrived promptly and were seated. By 8.30pm we still had no drinks or food orders taken and it wasn’t particularly busy as it seemed that most diners had finished. We certainly made it look like we were ready to order but we seemed to be ignored. We called over someone who turned out to be the manager and he hurried off to find someone to take the order then a couple of minutes later he came over with pen and paper to do it himself. Things improved then it turned out my dessert wasn’t available so I ordered something else. The other person was served then we sat and waited for another 10 minutes with no show of my replacement so we gave up and walked out. I then cancelled my birthday night booking.

Easily four people. We ended up at The Restaurant for my birthday as Manfredis on Orion had service issues.

We were docked in Sitka and given all our other tender ports were really pleased we were. There are free shuttle buses that were large and comfortable and were very frequent.

Last week

From a Celebrity cruiser. -Cuisine and especially the buffet is better on Viking. - Don’t know - Shoreex we usually organise private. We didn’t go on any Viking included excursions as we couldn’t make them work with our longer ones. Vikings optional excursions that included a plane, helicopter or boat were significantly more expensive than booking direct with the vendor. - Enrichment Programs. We became friends with an enrichment lecturer on Viking and he put in a lot of work. Not impressed with the Viking Cruise Director at all. - Customer Service. There was something going wrong with the Viking Customer service team on our cruise, or they are not empowered to sort out problems.

We were very much surprised too as we knew it had to be done before the ship cast off. I did hear that there was a demo that night at least in the buffet but if you weren’t there you didn’t see it.

We met the person who was the host for this trip and she enjoyed it. Our cruise (the one after yours) offered the much longer National Park cruise and which was more expensive and had a much lighter lunch. It was fabulous. We saw so many orcas and humpback whales. At one stage we snapped a photo that had a mixture of 7 black fins and emergent bodies. Loved it. Weather was perfect.

On our first day into Seward we did the Ships Kenai Fjord Cruise. It was excellent. Clear skies and sunny. We saw so many Orca and Humpbacks. A great last day before we disembarked in Seward. However Viking had organised buses that were not large enough to cater for the number of people booked yet we were all brought down to the wharf at once where the port authorities were telling us it was too dangerous “traffic wise” to be standing there. The Viking Shoreex people had long gone and were bringing out another group. Port people were not impressed.

10 night northbound on Viking Orion starting May 26th.

Our best whale watching was in Sitka and Seward. We saw whales from the ship but that really doesn’t count.

Last week We didn’t have a muster drill on our sailout day from Vancouver but was done the next sea day on Viking.