CannyScotTor

Bien sur!

Just pointing out that although CDNPolar’s experience seems to suggest that flying from Toronto to Europe is most likely a nonstop flight with no upcharge, it’s certainly not guaranteed. What we paid for the flights with Vilking was not significantly different from what we would have paid booking directly, I wasn’t expecting anything different.

Interesting, we just booked flights for our September cruise. Viking proposed Toronto to Vienna on KLM via Amsterdam with a five hour layover. We preferred Air Canada nonstop, which cost us $600 pp extra.

My impression is that dealing with Canadians is a bit of an afterthought for the Simi Valley office. Paying with echeck has always been a hit or miss affair, usually takes two or three attempts to get it done. My TA shudders at the thought of having to deal with them. As for Viking Air, argh! It is hard to imagine that you are dealing with the same company when you compare your experience on board and the experience dealing with Simi Valley. Wish they would open a Canadian office.

I’ve sat at a table close to the pool bar around lunchtime and ordered a beer and the waiter said that since it’s lunchtime, I won’t charge for it, I didn’t order any food. YMMV

It seems to me that having a butler is one of those things that you either love or hate. Personally, it doesn’t appeal at all. We book PS .cabins on VO, we like the space, a similar sized cabin on O comes with a butler, which is enough to put me off, I can’t see booking an O cruise solely because of that. My feeling is that it’s pretentious and potentially intrusive. I get it that some people are very appreciative of the service a butler can provide, it’s just not for me. I’m happy that there’s an option (viking) where I don’t have to put up with one. I blame Sandals for starting this nonsense, we don’t book them anymore because of this, despite having enough loyalty points for a free vacation (but that’s another story). As always, to each his/ her own. If you’re love ‘em, good on you.

Apologies to FlyerTalker, I seem to have edited your comments in my previous post in a way that makes them seem like they came from you, my bad.

You are right, actually. I don’t much care if it’s Viking or the airline that caused the problem. In this situation I am directly a customer of Viking. I view them as an agent, working on my behalf in dealing with the airline. If they are not willing or able to do a good job at that, I can choose not to use them in future.

Well, you can bang on all you like about the technicalities of how airlines run their business, but that’s not the point. For me, it’s a Viking Air customer service issue. I don’t like how Viking handled the situation, so I won’t use Viking Air in future, my choice. It may well be that dealing with an airline directly is not any better, but at least there won’t be an extra middleman getting in the way.

Yes, it was ticketed, our flights with ticket numbers , were shown on the airline’s website. The airline canceled one of our flights, fine that happens . My beef was with how Viking Air handled the change. They switched the segment to another flight, no problem, but the next segment was switched to a different airline, with an additional stop, in a different country. All of the seat reservations were cancelled on all segments, outbound and return. And they didn’t notify me of any of these changes. I expect this was all done automatically by Viking’s computer system, but it did a very poor job of it. What I would have expected was that they call me to say the flight was cancelled, and to tell me the options available so that I could choose a reasonable alternative. In the end, my extremely patient TA got everything put back to the way it was except for the cancelled segment. We now fly out earlier, and the next segment is as it was before.

I must have jinxed myself, having thought that we were all set. One day after we were “ticketed”, our return flights were replaced by new flights that were totally unacceptable for us. No warning beforehand , no notice afterwards. I only found out because I checked on MVJ, which I do regularly, (paranoid I guess). If they have to change your itinerary, the least they could do is to contact you and give you some options. I have often used Viking Air in the past, but I think that this is it for me. Too unreliable, and totally uncommunicative. FWIW our TA has contacted VA and has been able to get better, but not great, alternatives. Not impressed.

You have air plus, so don’t wait until the date posted in MVJ to book. We just got our flights ticketed for our flights in May, just over 200 days out. One of the flights we wanted (Copenhagen to Bergen) was already “full “, which I presume means that Viking’s allocation of seats on that flight has been used up already. We had to go with a later flight, so we have a much longer layover in Copenhagen. Good luck.

I managed to re-add my bookings. I usually access the site using my iPad, but used my PC to re-add the bookings, don't know if this is significant or not.

Is anyone else having trouble with MVJ? I can logon successfully, but my bookings are missing, and my account page shows no info.

We have had problems with this in the past. Viking asked for an image of a void cheque for the account to be used for payment. It seems that US and Canadian cheques are not encoded in the same way, apparently they inverted the institution number and transit number and ACH rejected the transaction. We just made an echeck payment last week, and we made sure our TA explicitly listed the institution, transit, and account numbers to Viking when submitting the payment, it was processed without error, and showed up in our bank account a day later.

Its a similar situation here in Canada, there are exceptions to carry on limits for prescription medications.

Bad things can happen: Obviously, everyone has different risk tolerance.

No doubt you can pack what you like. The risk you take is that a customs inspector decides that something is not permissible, and your bag is returned to your home instead of being delivered to the ship, or the offending items are confiscated.

One thing to keep in mind is the restrictions on what you can pack in your shipped luggage. Among other things, you can’t pack most toiletries (anything that contains alcohol,), electronics, batteries, aerosols etc. To make matters worse, many of these restricted items are either not allowed, or only allowed in limited amounts in your carry on luggage when you fly. Depending on what you want to take with you, your might need to check baggage with the airline, which might make the luggage forward service is somewhat less appealing. YMMV

Yes, I find it’s a bit confusing. You would think that hairdryers would be a popular thing that folks would want to bring on board, but they are not specifically listed either as being allowed or not.

Here is a link to a list of items that are prohibited on board. https://docs.vikingcruises.com/pdf/20190826-Prohibited-Item-List.pdf?_gl=1*i07fv5*_ga*NDU3MzU1MTgzLjE2ODg4MjYwOTk.*_ga_24KNYDH1S6*MTY4OTc4NTE3Mi4xLjAuMTY4OTc4NTE3Mi42MC4wLjA. It does not explicitly list hairdryers, but does list electrical appliances that produce heat. HTH

You do realize that the staff on board don’t actually directly receive any of the “tips“ you give to Viking. From what we can tell anecdotally, the money collected as “tips“ is not distributed directly to the crew. Viking has been very good at obfuscating how the collected gratuities are used. The more cynically minded among us believe that they go straight to Viking’s bottom line. We choose to pay the recommended “tips“, augmented by cash tips to staff that we feel have gone above and beyond. YMMV

OK Clay, go get a whole tub of popcorn. There has been some discussion on the recent tipping thread about what makes a cruise line “luxury “. So, let’s have some fun with this. What would make a cruise line be considered “luxury “ to you? Is it All inclusive? Having a butler? Fabulous food? Attentive staff? All you can drink champagne? Top class shore excursions? <insert your must have feature here> Talk among yourselves.

@molymoo, fair enough, I should have put emergency in quotes, but to be fair, Viking does refer to their in-transit help line as an “emergency “ phone number. Be that as it may, the point is that their help desk wasn’t very helpful. I know that there were earlier flights available on Viking partner airlines, but they weren’t prepared to switch flights for us. BTW the agent that gave us new boarding passes represented the airline (nothing to do with Viking’s air department). The reason we missed our connection was due to our flight leaving almost two hours late due to a mechanical problem, so the airline was at fault.

On our recent cruise, we missed our connection at Heathrow. Our airline had an agent at the arrival gate who gave us new boarding passes for a later flight, eight hours later. I called the Viking emergency number and asked if they could try to get us an earlier flight. They said that once we were in transit, it was up to the airline to arrange an alternative flight, and there was nothing they could do. They did send an email to their transfer department to make sure there was someone there to take care of us when we arrived, but that was it. We were most disappointed, essentially they didn’t do anything to help us with our emergency. YMMV