rico567

My expectation is that there would be no compensation for such things as missing a port due to weather, just as no airline will comp for things beyond their control. We returned to JFK from BCN in ‘06, on a flight scheduled to take us to ORD. Weather in Chicago no good, so we had to bunk the night in NY- on our own dime.

Thanks again to everyone who responded to my OP. Lots of great points of view on these topics, which is very helpful.

Thanks to all for the responses to my post!

Our first Viking ocean cruise is coming up next year, and their present advertising is very forward about not “nickel and diming” customers. Since this will also be our first ocean cruise of any kind (we’ve been on a couple of Viking river cruises and enjoyed them greatly) we of course have no basis of comparison to any other ocean cruise line. Nevertheless, several items have already presented themselves: 1) The alcoholic beverage package (maybe should not be included on this list, but it’s my list). 2) The blanket gratuity package. 3) The “deviation” charge to simply change the original arbitrarily assigned airline flight. 4) The list of included / charged excursions. We may run into some other things before it’s over, but I can start with these. Explanations follow. 1) How about several levels of alcohol package, say 3? All this stuff is done by computer anyhow, so no real cost to Viking….. 2) Gratuities are a can of worms, judging by what I’ve read on the boards, but not knowing how our gratuity package is parceled out is pretty unsatisfactory. Yeah, I’d like to make sure the ship’s service people I don’t even have contact with get some sort of gratuity, but I’d also like to make sure someone like our cabin steward is compensated better. 3) Viking Air, in assigning our included flights, arbitrarily put us on a very early morning flight that gets us out of bed at 0300 in the middle of January, and that time of year is fraught with uncertainty where we live. Simply to get the flight for the two of us moved back a day to give us some buffer to work with cost us $200. If we had had any choice about the original flight, that would be different, but we didn’t. 4) The list Viking gave us of excursions certainly has at least one “included” excursion at each port of call- but in nearly every case, the included ones are not much more than shopping in the port city. An all day excursion that looks interesting runs $100-200 per person. Of course, I’m certain Viking would not define any of these things as “nickel and diming” their customers…..so where exactly does that start?