I've been looking into Viking river cruises for a couple years now. Something about taking my hotel with me while I cruise around Europe just seems like a great idea. No bags to screw around with, 4 star dinners, no permits for crossing boarders with a rental car....
I had no idea there were so many companies doing that. I thought Viking was the only one. Probably due to their North American marketing campaign. There's probably a dozen different companies though.
With the exchange rate between the US dollar and the euro, this is a good time to visit Europe.
Viking is having a two for one sale right now, through the end of March. I'm just a bit apprehensive with the Viking cruises though. They look to have an older customer base than we are, by a couple decades. Nothing wrong with that, but if the client base is elderly, the things that are offered are different than say, bungee jumping and walking tours.
If anyone has some tips or have taken one of these trips, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I have a couple days to decide whether or not to book a trip on Viking to get their sale price.
We, personally, have not been on one of these trips, however, our neighbors, who are world travelers have been on TWO of them and after viewing many videos, pictures and having discussions in general, they speak very highly of the experience. They were on a cruise with a different company than Viking, yet, they have very similar style boats and they all hold about 200-250 people at most so you get more personalized service, you are travelling on a river as opposed to the ocean so possible high waves and bad weather won't be a factor and you get to travel through a number of different countries where one can get directly off the boat at the various ports and not have to worry about tendering with the primary element being to experience the culture. It is quite the different experience from most cruises, not the bedlam of thousands of people coming and going.
From what I discern, however, like many cruises, because of affordability, of course, it tends to be an older crowd so I suppose that is something one has to live with. I would expect though the reasons for the heavy discounts is the time of the year(early in the season) and the weather whereby it is still pretty similar to N/A(early spring)and that could be problematic for any walking tours.
