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20 days on the Rhine River (2023)

  • Basler Rathaus
  • The hillsides of Gimmelwald
  • Basler Münster
  • A stream flowing over a rock bed, layers of mountains in the background

D and I joined my parents and our extended family on an 8-day long cruise up the Rhine River during the spring of 2023. The cruise set sail in Basel, Switzerland and ended in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. D and I arrived a week before the cruise to do some hiking in the Swiss Alps.

The entire collection of posts related to our Rhine River trip can be found here, with links to each post below. Feel free to read in consecutive order (which is chronological), or hop around!

All posts

  1. Switzerland | Basel
  2. Switzerland | Lauterbrunnen Valley
  3. Switzerland | Thunersee and St. Beatus Caves
  4. Switzerland | Grindelwald First and Bachalpsee
  5. Switzerland | Brienzersee - Gießbachfälle and Iseltwald
  6. Switzerland | Jungfraujoch - Top of Europe
  7. Switzerland | Bern
  8. Germany | Der Schwarwald (Black Forest) and Breisach
  9. (Coming Soon!) France | Strasbourg
  10. (Coming Soon!) Germany | Speyer
  11. (Coming Soon!) Germany | Rhineland sailing
  12. (Coming Soon!) Germany | Koblenz
  13. (Coming Soon!) The Netherlands | Kinderdijk UNESCO World Heritage Site
  14. (Coming Soon!) The Netherlands | Keukenhof Gardens
  15. (Coming Soon!) The Netherlands | Amsterdam

An honest review of Viking's Rhine River cruise

Our "little" family collective totaled 30 people, including some family friends! It was good to reconnect with extended family, but we were the youngest in our family group and out of the 300 passengers on the cruise by at least a 30-year margin traveling by cruise. The pace of activities and life on the cruise definitely reflected the mean age of its passengers. If we're going for radical honesty here, D said it best when he described it as a "floating nursery home".

Every day, we'd be served breakfast from 6-9am, get herded onto a bus to take a guided, 1-hour walking tour, herded back on the ship for lunch from 12-2pm, bang our heads against the wall (or take a long afternoon nap as most of our elders did) while the ship set sail, and sit back down for dinner from 6-9pm. Sure, there would be informational talks in the afternoon and there were a couple days where we were docked for up to 4 hours at a port and you could hop off to explore, but generally, I was really fucking bored and was losing it.

Also, since river cruise ships need to be small enough to go through river locks, it meant that there wasn't space for facilities you'd see on an ocean cruise -- no games (other than 1-hole minigolf), no hot tubs, not even a small weight room! I could only read and play so much chess for 16 hours of the day, every day. I felt my body slowly atrophying from the lack of activity, and would pace the roof deck like a fucking caged animal.

And even though 20 out of the 30 people in our group were vegetarian and had given VERY advanced noticed (like months ahead), we were definitely treated and fed like second, or third-class citizens. The quality and quantity of food we were served was infuriating, disgusting, and sad: soups were just salted, clear water with (I-kid-you-not) four fingernail-sized cubes of broccoli stem; entrees ranged from a single, stuffed baby portabello cap (also not exaggerating, I had to order 4 of these to feel like I wasn't starving) to a kid-sized bowl of salad.

We complained multiple times to the maître d'hôtel, who is supposed to manage the dining and beverage service, with little visible improvement throughout the trip. Those who didn't have dietary restrictions, like D, were getting generous portions of steak, locally-caught fish, and creative regional dishes. And we were stuck eating toasted bread and butter to fill our bellies, like peasants, even though we paid the same money as everyone else. Literally none of the staff, from Viking corporate to the ship management crew, even bothered to act like they gave any shits.

I already wrote a scathing review when we got our feedback forms from Viking, but let this be a warning to anyone who cares about their family members and doesn't want to see them go hungry for 8 days while trapped on a boat where there is no food accessible besides designated mealtimes: 1) just don't do a cruise, especially with Viking; 2) provide feedback on your family's behalf. It matters. D was pretty mad about how we were treated and also didn't hesitate to bring the issue up to management, which I think helped us with a couple meals immediately following, where we got a bowl of pasta instead of two sprigs of asparagus and a carrot as our main.

Also, the alcohol wasn't even free or free-flowing! At least on ocean cruises, you really get your bang for your buck with multiple cafeterias and open bars available 24/7. On Viking? No, no food except for a tray of cookies at the coffee machine, and the only alcohol that was free was the same bottle of red and white wine for the entirety of the cruise. They didn't even bother swapping it out for a regional wine in between. If you ordered any other glass of wine or even a can of beer, it cost you $$$.

I'm telling y'all, this river cruise was a pure cash grab and 100% not worth your money. I don't know how other cruise companies compare, but Viking was not an experience I deserved to have.