A Viking Star video review: Many hits, and a few misses

Towards the end of our recent Caribbean cruise on the Viking Star, I sat down and reviewed a long list of things that they got right with this ship... and a shorter list of things that Viking got wrong on this one. Incorporating a whole bunch of video clips I shot during the cruise to illustrate my points, I've put together a little video that will do a good job of helping to see what's so great about this ship, and where Viking has some room for improvement.

If you have 19 minutes to devote to watching it,

Or watch it here on CruiseCritic, in a small-screen format:

Wow! Thank you.

Hmmm...not much choices and variations in dining... bummer!

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Towards the end of our recent Caribbean cruise on the Viking Star, I sat down and reviewed a long list of things that they got right with this ship... and a shorter list of things that Viking got wrong on this one. Incorporating a whole bunch of video clips I shot during the cruise to illustrate my points, I've put together a little video that will do a good job of helping to see what's so great about this ship, and where Viking has some room for improvement.

 

If you have 19 minutes to devote to watching it,

, where you can watch the video full-screen in HD...

 

Or watch it here on CruiseCritic, in a small-screen format:

 

[YOUTUBE]eID9qlcVFzE[/YOUTUBE]

 

Enjoyed your video review of the Viking Star! Thank you so much for sharing with us. I have been on the Viking Star and we are going to be on her again in February.

Enjoyed this video. Wouldn't agree about the food options. There are two speciality restaurants which are not mentioned. There is no surcharge. Manfredi's does the best steak I have had on board ship. The Chefs Table offering five courses and paired wine was also fantastic.

Thank you for posting.

Enjoyed this video. Wouldn't agree about the food options. There are two speciality restaurants which are not mentioned. There is no surcharge. Manfredi's does the best steak I have had on board ship. The Chefs Table offering five courses and paired wine was also fantastic.

Thank you for posting.

I don't agree about the food options either. I thought there were plenty of options and plenty of choices on the menus. Not only that, the food was excellent--flavorful, freshly cooked, well-seasoned.

Thanks for the great video review.

Great video, thanks

We thought the food options on board were great. Spending a month on board gave us a true opportunity to experience - we were more than happy. We are booked again next year for 22 days, and honestly would not have done so if we weren't happy with this and most all aspects of Viking.

The wine.....that could use some upgrading IMHO...but when needing a change you could bring your own (if sailing from/within a wine centric local) or order off a menu that wasn't too over the top.

I would vote for a wine upgrade before a single change about the food.

Going on a Med cruise on Viking Sea in just over one week, so this was really appreciated. It sounds like,the perfect ship for two people in their seventies.

I must say that I don't agree on the no scooter policy. We were on a Celebrity ship last winter and there weren't many scooters at all. Also, the people using them were most considerate of others.

I'm sure there will be more than enough food to make us happy. We eat far more on a cruise than we do at home, so there will be no complaints from us.

Can't wait. [emoji1]

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Do you have any comments on the shore excursions you'd recommend?

Jim -- Thank you so much for this intelligent, thoughtful, video review. It sure whets our appetite for the 120-day World Cruise on the Viking Sun in Jan 2018.

Do you have any comments on the shore excursions you'd recommend?

The first thing I'd suggest is that you take a look at the full list of shore excursions, prices, and start times.

In San Juan, I truly enjoyed the Old San Juan Historical Walking Tour. I've been to San Juan many times, and toured El Morro on my own, but this walking tour brought it to life a lot more since the guide was VERY knowledgeable. She was able to provide a lot of details that I did not pick up on my own in my previous visits to San Juan.

If you're a beach person and are interested in spending time at a beautiful Caribbean beach, I'd recommend the "Escape to Jost Van Dyke" tour in Tortola. A very nice boat takes you over to Jost Van Dyke and drops you off at the beach for a few hours. Enjoy a fantastic beach, and buy yourself lunch at the world-famous Soggy Dollar Bar. On the boat ride back to the ship, there are free drinks.

Definitely DO NOT sign up for whale watching in St Lucia. I actually went to the shore excursion desk to sign up for this, and they strongly advised me NOT to book it! During the previous week, there was not a single whale to be seen on this excursion, and people on this tour were very unhappy with it. A few days after getting this excellent advice from the shore excursion person, I actually ran in to someone in the elevator who had been on the whale watching tour earlier that day... and she said that it was horrible and that they, too, saw no whales.

If you've never been to St. Kitts before, you might want to do the scenic railway excursion. That gives a nice overview of the island for someone who is a first time visitor.

In St Maarten, there is no need to book a shore excursion through the ship. Either grab a cab and go to world-famous Maho Beach, located right at the end of the airport runway, and enjoy the beach while planes fly very low overhead as they approach the runway...

Or, take the ferry for $7 each over to the nearby beach on Great Bay and enjoy that beach, with no airplanes landing overhead. At either beach, you can have lunch at a fairly decent beach restaurant, while you're there.

In St Thomas, the excursion to St Johns Beach takes you to one of the best beaches in the world. Or the Turtle Bay snorkeling excursion is excellent, too. I saw more turtles while snorkeling at Turtle Bay during our cruise than I had seen in either of my two previous visits. The fact that I've now done the Turtle Bay excursion three times should probably tell you something.

Also, I'd recommend that you leave at least two days wide open without booking any excursions. That will allow you to stay on the ship and just enjoy what the ship has to offer, while most of the other passengers are off on adventures. We actually stayed aboard the ship on 3 days, and we just really enjoyed those three lazy days with an empty ship and nothing to do but relax. But for most people, three lazy days would probably be too many. Do at least leave one or two days open, though.

I hope that's helpful!

The first thing I'd suggest is that you take a look at the full list of shore excursions, prices, and start times.

 

 

I'd recommend that you leave at least two days wide open without booking any excursions. That will allow you to stay on the ship and just enjoy what the ship has to offer, while most of the other passengers are off on adventures. We actually stayed aboard the ship on 3 days, and we just really enjoyed those three lazy days with an empty ship and nothing to do but relax. But for most people, three lazy days would probably be too many. Do at least leave one or two days open, though.

 

I hope that's helpful!

Very helpful!

I have been looking at excursions and converted your PDF excursion sheet to excel. Our islands are in a slightly different order and some excursions have been eliminated and others have been added.

I appreciate your thoughtful advice. This will be our 11th or 12th cruise but is our first time to the Carribean. I completely agree about taking some down days. Do you have recommendations on the islands to take a pass on?

Great review and really helpful information. Thank you sincerely for taking so much time on this for all of us!

I completely agree about taking some down days. Do you have recommendations on the islands to take a pass on?

We're beach people. We just love vacationing in the Caribbean so we can spend time at some of the world's best beaches. So, we stayed on the ship during the days where there wasn't a beach shore excursion, or snorkeling excursion, that was to our liking. For us, that was St Lucia, St Kitts, and Guadeloupe.

Special note about St Kitts, for "beach people":

There is actually a beach excursion while the ship is in St Kitts, we just decided not to take it. The "Nevis Sailaway" will take you on a long boat ride over to the neighboring island of Nevis, and then give you a few hours at the beach there, before another long boat ride back to St Kitts. We had done this excursion on our last visit to St Kitts, and felt like it was too much boating for too little beach time, so we decided to pass this time around. But if you're OK with spending a while on a boat in order to get to a beach, you might want to consider this excursion.

We're beach people. We just love vacationing in the Caribbean so we can spend time at some of the world's best beaches. So, we stayed on the ship during the days where there wasn't a beach shore excursion, or snorkeling excursion, that was to our liking.

Thanks! Our airline reservations are showing this morning so It is getting closer.

Spaniel lover, let me add my thanks for your video. Your video assessment of the ship helped me pull the trigger and booked earlier today the New York, Bermuda, and West Indies cruise in 2018 that visits several of the same islands you were on.

As I commented on a thread I started today, "Am I dreaming", the value proposition for the cruises right now in the America's with the free airfare and the reduced cabin price makes this decision a no-brainer with the input from you and others on the quality of the ship.

Thanks for your work putting this video together; I am sharing it with several friends I am enticing to join us on our cruise.

Doug

Thank you for the video. Very nice.

As I am looking forward to my first Viking cruise in January I found your video very helpful. Thank you.

We too are in a Deluxe Veranda and so might also have welcomed more storage space.

However the positives far outweigh any minor negatives and I am sure we will have a wonderful cruise on a very beautiful ship.

Love your review! We are sailing Nov 17 on this trip. Were some of your impressions fromthis being Vikings first cruising in the Carib?

Thank you for a great review with pictures of the Viking Star in the Caribbean.

Your "misses" do not bother me in the least.

Looking forward to my first Viking cruise 2018.

BTW ,loved your video of the ship spaces!!!!!

I was on their second sailing in the Caribbean. I know they did learn a few things the hard way on their first trip, and they made some corrections on our trip based on those things. So I was very glad I had not sailed the previous week. I knew there would be a learning curve for Viking... there always is for anything... so that's why I booked the second cruise, not the first.

But I think your real question is:

"Will some of the things I listed as misses end up getting corrected as time goes on? Is it possible that some of those issues won't be issues a few weeks or months from now?"

I guess they might try not filling the two very deep pools so high. That would be an improvement. But it would ruin the infinity effect at the aft pool, and make it impossible to peer over the edge.

I really don't think they're going to be able to solve that air conditioning issue at the mid-ship pool anytime soon. I think the problem is that the Wintergarden and the mid-ship pool share one air conditioning system. If they turn up the AC so high that it makes the mid ship pool area comfortable, the Wintergarden would be like a freezer. Maybe someday, years from now, when the ship is eventually in dry dock for maintenance, they could do some big modification to that air conditioning system. But that's a LONG way off.

Maybe they might someday add more entertainment choices in the evenings, and not schedule good ones at the exact same time. That might be do-able if they hear from enough people that there aren't enough good entertainment choices in the evenings.

Maybe they might add major American TV networks like CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox to their satellite TV system.

I doubt they're ever going to have the kind of variety in their buffet that you see on a mega cruise ship. The buffet on Anthem Of The Seas is probably three times as large and diverse. But that's a huge ship, and Viking Star is not. I think a smaller number of food choices just goes with small-ship cruising. And I certainly don't see them adding more specialty restaurants. That's another thing that only really goes with the mega cruise ship experience.

But please don't misunderstand me... I really enjoyed my cruise on Viking Star, and I really think they're on to something! I absolutely LOVED the uncrowded nature of this cruise, and the fact that there were no children, and no electric scooters. I loved they way the staff treated me like an adult. I loved that Viking never tried to nickel-and-dime me. And I'm going to miss every one of those things anytime I sail on some other cruise line!

If Viking ever offers some different variation on the Caribbean itinerary... for example a cruise that includes Aruba and Curacao... or a Western Caribbean itinerary... you can be sure I will be back to Viking again.

And if I ever decide to do a European river cruise... I absolutely will do that on Viking. They impressed the heck out of me!

Try china, I think that you would enjoy it. It's a combination land and river tour

I can't tell you how much we enjoyed the Grand European River cruise. Seriously, cruising just isn't the same anymore. We prefer River over Ocean now. I wish Viking could offer the Homelands cruise via a river, LOL.