Hello all - I am considering a Danube cruise for my mother and I. Next July, I'm looking at all the lines but tops right now seems to be Peter Deilmann's Mozart. Which leads me to my question.

On some of the stops it appears you have as little as 1 1/2 or 2 hours. Is this accurate? I realize you don't have the mass of people to get off the ship, but . . . . Please help me understand how these cruises work.

Thanks so very much!

When they only show an hour or so at a port, it's to allow passengers to get on their tour buses. The boat then continues on the trip and the touring passengers meet them at the next stop.

We have done two Tauck river cruises, Amsterdam-Budapest and Bucharest-Budapest. We always had half or full day off boat tours via bus and many times the boats continued down the river as we toured. Some of the people did stay on the boat(I would have loved to as the scenery was so beautiful)...I think we had one or two short stops when we got off and walked into town on a little guided excursion, but mostly it was on buses. I highly recommend river cruises. We especially liked the Rhine as it had so much interesting river traffic.

We've gone on a river cruise with Viking (and are booked for another next year) from Vienna to Nuremburg that stopped in Durnstein, Melk, Linz, Passau, and Regensburg. The stops on this cruise were a minimum of a half day and mostly full days. At all of these ports we could walk right into town or in the case of Vienna and Nuremburg were a short public transport (subway/bus) ride away from town. From Linz, there was a bus excursion to Salzburg which we participated in. At many of the other ports, we opted to do our own thing which is what we prefer.

In the larger cities on the Danube it looks like you are for a full day. Some of the smaller towns can be toured in a couple hours. Some of the smaller towns would be Bratislava, Melk and Esztergom. The larger cities would be Vienna and Budapest, where you should have alonger time.

Sorry about the delay - life got it mine way there for a bit.

Thanks for all of the info. I'm very excited about the idea of the cruise - I think it could be just the thing!

On the GCT Danube Christmas cruise the ship was generally docked all day, with all the travel done during the night. We usually had a tour with a local guide that lasted about 1-1/2 hours and then were able to do what we wanted with the rest of the time. That worked very well for me.