Viking river cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest
 

Be very careful before booking this cruise in the summer months. Viking provides an excellent river cruise, but our experience was horrible when part of the river tour was replaced with a bus tour due to low water in the Rhine. Some of the problems included:

• Low quality buffets with inadequate amounts of food
• Poor hotel accommodations with views a neighboring apartments enjoying shirtless events on their balconies
• Stops at restaurants that could adequately accommodate the number of patrons and were served cold food with poor service
• Stops at rest stops that required pay toilets while few of the Viking guests had the necessary coins and were required to make purchases from the convenience store to get change.

Viking did offer vouchers due to the inconvenience (though I would not never have subjective my self to such a horrible experience no matter how cheap), but if for some extraordinary reason you were unable to redeem it in one-year, the value was lost.

I am sorry to hear about your bad experience. I would expect that the water levels being low (or high) has written in the contract with language indicating that it might be replaced with alternative transport.

Perhaps putting your experience on Cruise Critic or the cruise section of this forum might garner additional feedback.

So sorry your cruise was such a disappointment. We had many problems on Viking and would never book with them again. Look at AMAWaterways for a much better experience.

I think that makes complete sense. I've found Viking ships in backwaters when cycling around and they do seem to have found cheap morings and their staff, while waiting for the water to come back, did not look well provided for (Thai?)

The whole water thing is part of Climate Change I guess, certainly makes sense. Having lots of people in a restaurant not designed for it would mean that food is going to be more likely disorganised and might well tend towards the mass service sort of places and since they would be provisioned "at a price" relatively poor.

Poor accom and badly behaved fellow guests. Well space is at a premium and Viking is aimed at the mass market.

The countries you pass through charge for using the loo. This,of course, leads to zones in the "aires" which stink of urine and worse. Welcome to one of the more stupid decisions of planners. Not Viking's fault. On the upside, I bet the loos were clean with little graffiti.

does not matter which company you use.. if the water is low then alternatives may not be the best.

I don’t blame them for the low water. I blame them for the 3rd class solution they provided in its place