rjp50

I see people talking about entering credit card information when they make their reservations. However, under my account there is a field to fill out for credit card information for any expenses incurred while on board. If this is filled out prior to booking excursions before the trip, will this card automatically be used to pay for the excursions or must I still manually enter card information each time I pay for the excursions in my cart? Note: I will be paying by credit card, not ACH transfer.

Thank you for a very detailed response. This helps a lot.

We will be taking our first Viking Ocean excursion this summer (Into the Midnight Sun). We will be making our excursion reservations soon and I have a few questions. First, we have generally been disappointed with excursions offered by other cruise lines, finding them to be with too many people and quite impersonal. As such, we tend to book independent tours whenever possible. Given that Viking seems to offer a more premium product in general, I was wondering if their shore excursions are also better than the larger cruise lines. Does it make a difference in terms of quality and number of participants if the tour is included or an optional? Secondly, I see a lot of posts regarding strategies to make reservations before they are filled up. Is this a concern of just getting the best time for an included excursion or do all/most/many optional excursions also sell out? Hopefully they always have enough slots to accommodate everyone on the included excursions. Thirdly, when traveling with another couple, can I make reservations for all four of us as long as I have their booking number or does each couple have to make them separately? If the former, would I need credit card information of the other couple in the case of optional excursions. If the latter, how can you be assured of getting on the same tour at the same time?

I'm not sure I agree with the new staff training issues. The Star Breeze is not a new ship in their fleet. It is just being re-deployed into FP on a permanent basis. The staff will come with the ship fully trained.

For us as well. I checked at 7 AM EST and it was still closed but when I checked around 9:30 it was open.

Add me to the pro-medallion crowd. Loved them and the Princess app that allowed you to find fellow cruise members and to be able to order food and drinks from anywhere in the ship and have the waiters find you with your order. When we recently sailed again on Celebrity it felt like the dark ages in comparison. As to security - when ordering something from a waiter at one of the bars, when he brought back our drinks and the cards he gave us someone else's cards. We never noticed the mistake until we got back to our room and couldn't open our door. Needless to say, someone else had our cards and hence access to our room and could make charges on them until we went to guest services and straightened things out. The cruise experience was so much better with the medallions it will influence our decision to cruise on Princess in the future even though we have long been Celebrity cruisers.

We are on the cruise after yours (3/4/24) and I have the same question. It is getting a bit tedious checking both the app and the website multiple times per day. Sure wish they had a standardized time before a cruise to open the reservation window. I wonder if our window will open three days after yours or some other random time.

This will be our first Viking cruise so I do not yet have the confidence that their documentation is fully accurate. In our last cruise with a different premium cruise company, their documentation said we did not need a visa for Indonesia. When the US State Dept. web site said that we did, I called customer service and was told that I should always believe the company's documentation rather than the State Department ... in the end, the documentation and customer service were wrong. Hopefully the Viking documentation will continue to be accurate and I will develop the faith in it that long time Viking travelers apparently do. Thank you for the suggestion to check the Port of London website which confirmed the Greenwich port for our cruise in June.

We are on the Saturn for a Midnight Sun itinerary in June. All of the Viking documentation for the trip says that it starts with an overnight in Greenwich. I was looking forward to staying in that area not only for the attractions in the immediate vicinity but also the ease in getting there from central London and also the ease in doing things during the full day we will be in port before departing for Scotland. However, I just checked https://www.cruisemapper.com/ports/london-tilbury-port-1163?month=2024-07#schedule and was dismayed to see that according to this web site all of the Viking ships are scheduled to use the Tilbury port. I am hoping that this is an error on the part of cruisemapper.com but in further research on Cruise Critic is does appear that Viking does use the Tilbury port. Does anyone have any further information on this? I can't imagine why they would schedule an overnight stay in a commercial port with no real access to London.

From previous posts, it appears that there is no set day prior to the cruise that they open up the system for making reservations. Our cruise will be starting in early March and hence I expect the reservation window to open any day now so I periodically check the web site to see if they are accepting reservations yet. To avoid having to do this multiple times per day, is there a set time of day that they open up the reservation window, such as at midnight EST or some other time?

Thanks. The listing on the cruise planner for Tromso has two included tours - a walking tour and a panoramic bus tour. Which one did you go on that is not so great? Did you talk with anyone else as to what they did in Tromso which may be better?

We will be doing this cruise this summer and I am starting to plan our shore excursion strategy. Specifically, for each port I would like to have a plan for using either the included excursion, a paid Viking excursion, a third party excursion or a combination of these. Does anyone who has been on this cruise or a different itinerary but with some shared ports have any suggestions for each of the ports? Any "must do" excursions? Any "don't waste your time" excursions. In general, we are not big on information overload excursions where the guides pump you full of trivia that within a few hours you have forgotten all of it. We prefer sightseeing and ones that are more photogenic.

This may be a basic question that was answered before but I have not been able to read the entire thread. Early in the thread a lot of people said that they waited until on board to make reservations so they could get the menu that they wanted. Does this imply that generally time slots are still available after all the pre-booking is complete? A follow-on question is, if the former is true, is it possible to eat at the chefs table on more days than what your cabin status allows for pre-boarding reservations? Finally, does this also apply to Manfredi?

For the comedy shows, are they the same in both venues or do they have different routines? In other words, does it make sense to reserve in each venue?

We just got a response back from our request to Royal. They found a table with 3 elderly couples, all of whom were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and having their vows renewed onboard. They were able to bump them in our favor. Naah, I'm kidding. However, like any large operation, they must keep some tables reserved for special circumstances such as this. It never hurts to ask and Royal delivered. They also volunteered to have a special refrigerator in the diabetic's room for her insulin. I never would have thought of that.

There are no reservations available at the 5:15 seating. While my original concern was just the shows, I realize now that one member of our party of 6 is severely diabetic and can't wait until 8 PM to eat. We are trying to escalate the situation with Royal.

For health reasons by several members of our party, late dining is not an option. I was hoping that I was just missing something but based on the responses so far, we are very disappointed in Royal. I've never been on any cruise line that doesn't open up the any time dining room until 6:45 and then is booked solid to 8 PM. I just checked about switching to 5:15 traditional dining and that is booked. I can't believe we will be paying that kind of money and have to eat in a cafeteria.

Does this mean that they never charge for any bottles brought on more than the two that they claim to allow? That is, do they not enforce the two bottle limit?

We recently booked a cruise on the Allure. I am confused about the times available for My Time Dining and in particular how that works with show times. It appears that the earliest you can get into MTD is 6:45. Even if that were possible for us (it isn't since the first available reservation isn't until 8:00), how could we possibly eat and still see shows like the Abba show that starts at 8 PM? All of the other early shows are also impossible to see with MTD. Any other cruise line that we have sailed on allows open dining as early as 5:30 so that you can still see the early shows that start at 7 PM. Am I missing some secret sauce to allow eating earlier without the constraint of fixed dining at 5:15 which seems too early for us?

That sounds perfect. Based on the previous response, I assume it is first come first served? Being from A2, can I assume that a Go Blue is warranted?

Ahh, good to know. Thanks.

Thanks for the responses. We seem to be zeroing in on a 4-night sailing of Liberty of the Seas out of Fort Lauderdale. From what I have read, the show is a Cirque du Soleil-style show called "In the Air". We are not big fans of this type of show so perhaps the reservation issue for this particular show is not an issue. But does that mean that the main auditorium is used every night for this show and no other shows are provided? Or do they they provided alternative shows on other nights. I certainly hope so.

We normally sail on Celebrity but have also cruised on several other cruise lines. This past April we took a family trip on the Oasis. One thing that struck me in terms of differences with the Oasis (and perhaps RCI in general), was the need for reservations to the various shows. On all of our other cruises we can show up 15 minutes or so before the show and have no trouble finding seats. For our Oasis cruise I tried to get reservations a month or so out and virtually nothing was available for any of the venues. I have read here that a lot of the reservation holders don't show up and you can generally get seats for the various shows. Because of family activities and commitments we never tested this theory. So, my question is: for ships that sail 4 and 5 night cruises out of Florida ports, how easy is it to see all of the various shows without reservations? How long before the shows do you need to line up? We are looking at making a last minute booking for this January or February and assume that all the show reservations will already be filled and wonder whether we will be disappointed with our entertainment options.

Color me confused. If everyone on the cruise said that this particular cruise was an abnormally to what they normally experienced, I would be more willing to give the YC a second chance rather than cancel my future cruises. I must say that what I read here does not at all resemble our previous three YC experiences. Even the disembarkation experience was totally different. In our case, our butler escorted us all the way to the taxi stand and made sure our luggage was properly loaded into the taxi and that the taxi driver knew where we were going. Of course all of our previous experiences were in Europe or the Middle East, so perhaps that has something to do with it. I’m not sure what is included in the Celibrity retreat experience from a lounge perspective, but if Michael’s club is the extent of it, I’ll take the YC all day long. We are currently on a Celebrity ship and every time we walk past Michael’s Club, it is like a ghost town. By contrast, spending time in the YC lounge, listening to the music there every night was one of the highlights of the YC experience - especially since our room was literally steps away.

We recently received a move up offer for the Equinox where the minimum bid for a sunset sky suite was substantially lower than a regular sky suite (415 versus 1540). Could this be real or just a clerical data entry error? I assume there is no harm in trying for the sunset sky suite, or am I missing something? This whole move up process is new to me.