IMPORTANT TO NOTE:
The comments below have been edited to avoid repetition and to attempt to convey a more accurate representation of the kinds of guest feedback appears in river cruising g cyberspace. The informed consumer will never allow someone using a phony name to dictate which river cruise experience will best serve your specific needs. That is the job of a respected, experienced, river cruise consultant.
We have no intention of becoming a gossip site. We try to eliminate comments from anyone who even remotely sounds like a marketing person for one of the river boat lines. The comments that appear below are sourced from our own guest evaluations as well as from other media sources that we believe to be generally accurate.
But we want you to be aware that Buzz Marketing influences much of what you read on the internet about various companies and travel products. Buzz marketing means that you assume a false identity and then post negative comments about your competition while writing positive and believable comments about your own product. This is so pervasive in the cruise and river boat industry, that we will share just one example with you:
One of our Churchill and Turen Editors was researching a cruise line on one of the popular feedback sites. There were many links to a “report” written by Mary. Everyone thought it was terrific. The report ran 23 pages describing a mostly fantastic one week cruise. Several weeks later, this same editor was at a travel press cocktail gathering when a small group could be heard laughing about the number of hits Mary’s story had received. Our Editor walked up to the group to ask if this was The Mary who had written the 23 page report. One of the gentleman said they were and asked if our Editor would like to “Meet Mary”. He then introduced him to a gentleman in a goatee who worked in the marketing department of the cruise line.
“We’re not idiots”, one of the marketing execs explained, “We know people read this crap, Nowadays if you work in marketing you need to have 30 or 40 e-mails addresses. We have to control the reviews.”
This is called Buzz Marketing. The people who do this for a living attend annual conventions and many of our largest corporations participate. Most of what you read on a feedback site is tainted and we suggest you look more at reporting trends rather than isolated comments. In fact, there are some absolutely awful river boat companies that appeal primarily to the budget European traveler. We do not review those lines. We only review river cruise lines that have a solid international reputation and are the “Best of the Best” within the industry.
But as we clearly state on our home page, not one of the river boats in Europe is able to provide a true five-star experience and so critiques are, we believe, both appropriate and helpful to the lines. We’ve done our best to provide you with the commentary we feel is the least likely to be produced by Buzz Marketers. In many cases, the comments and evaluations are provided by clients whose background and travel experience is known to us. They are long-term clients. However, we are also including commentary from industry sources outside of our control. We urge you to always be cautious about opinions expressed by someone who is hiding behind a fictitious name:
We recently returned from Uniworld’s Provence and Burgundy itinerary. There were so many things we liked about our treatment including free internet service, even if it was rather slow, the complimentary wines served at dinner, and, my husband’s favorite aspect of the cruise, a 24 hour coffee station. The fact that he slept so well despite drinking six or seven cups of coffee a day, is probably some kind of testament to the quality of the bedding on Uniworld. Oh, we also loved the fact that we could use the boat’s bicycles at no extra charge. The only problem was that, given the caffeine, we tended to drive the local bike paths faster than necessary.
One thing people should note about Viking River versus Avalon. The booking discounts are handled differently. On Viking River Cruises you often have to pay in full for the entire cruise, letting them hold on to your money many months in advance of sailing. We’ve found that on Avalon all you need is a deposit to get the discounts.
Both my husband and I are on Gluten-free diets. We sailed on Grand Circle and they were wonderful about taking care of our dietary needs. Now, we understand that AMA will be offering a complete Gluten-Free cruise in May of 2013. We’re going to sign up. That’s a great idea.
We just returned from sailing Uniworld’s River Royale. It was a really good experience and, despite all the warnings about the top decks being unusable for very long periods because of the number of bridges the boat would need to pass under, we had no problems. We were up there quite a bit, although good quality chaise lounges would be appreciated. Our cabin, like virtually every cabin except the top suites, was 150 square feet. We would suggest to first-timers that they use 150 as the absolute minimum cabin size. Anything smaller would be really tight. As it was, there was no room for dancing in our cabin and don’t even think you are both going to be able to share the bathroom at the same time.
Having just returned from our third river cruise, two on Viking River, and one on Uniworld, we were really surprised and disappointed by the lack of ethnic diversity aboard all three of the boats. We won’t go into statistics but everyone on all three sailings seemed to be upper middle to upper class whites, primarily retired. We love river cruising and we will do it again, but we hope, as time moves on, that it will become a bit more diverse in terms of the people who take these cruises. It would be great if, as we disembark in these villages in the heart of Europe, the folks getting off the boat more accurately represented the American population. We were also disappointed by the lack of in-depth lectures on both lines regarding contemporary life in the places we were visiting. There were a million positives and I would say our second Viking cruise on the Portugal’s River of Gold itinerary was our favorite.
A note to Viking River. Please stop pushing your cheap wines for purchase in the so-called lounge “briefings” just prior to dinner. It cheapened the entire experience.
We had an absolutely delightful time on Grand Circle’s Provence doing a cruise in southern France. The boat is unusual because instead of the 120 or so on most of the big name river boats, the Provence only carried 46 guests. Before the cruise ended, my wife and I knew just about every one of them.
Tauck’s Danube program was not as good as other Tauck Tours we have enjoyed during the past decade. Our biggest complaint was that unlike its land tours, Tauck’s programs off the river boats seemed always to be on a tight schedule and the guides were rushed to get us from place to place. There also was something unsettling about giving in to a relaxed cruise along the Danube and then being scooped up and tossed on a bus. We far preferred the walking tours but that limited what we could see.
We enjoyed our recent cruise on Avalon’s Felicity, an eight-day Rhine River cruise that made us understand why this kind of vacation is so popular. I would advise those who are considering this boat to make sure they know that the twin beds are only inches apart, the cabin we were in was amply but certainly small compared to cruise ship cabins on Princess and Celebrity, lines we’ve sailed in the past. We recommend the Rhine itinerary and visitors to RBR (River Boat Ratings) should know that the portion of the cruise between Bingen and Koblenz is absolutely the highlight of the trip, a forty mile stretch of castles and lovely villages, some easily viewed from the boat. We were off the boat each day of course and were disappointed in the fact that we just had very little interaction with locals. We tried to remedy that, midway through the cruise, by trying to always have dessert and tea ashore.
The Tauck ships are all just about identical except for décor. We have been on two and have researched the line quite a bit and we see no reason to make any decision based on which of the Tauck river boats is being used on your itinerary. Tauck is, in this way, the least confusing, as well as the most expensive, of the available options. You get what you pay for. Some think they can “trick” the system but it usually doesn’t work out that way as our 22 years of travel will attest. Tauck has three decks of space. The cabins on the bottom deck one have windows. On Deck 2 you will find the mid-range cabins that are 150 sq. feet with a French, (you have to be a thin French person to actually stand in the space) balcony. Having stayed in this category we would suggest that first-time cruisers consider 150 square feet as their red line in the sand. Anything smaller is going to feel like Cool Hand Luke when he was sent to “the box”. Deck 3 has some French balcony cabins and it is also home to the 14 300 sq. feet suites.
River cruising has its points, I suppose, value being one of them, but we felt that our Rhine cruise on Avalon was a bit of a letdown. The company is owned by Globus a huge tour company that seems to own several other tour companies. There were several small groups on board, some from Globus and others from other companies that had blocked space for their group. This all seemed confusing. I guess the best example of what it was like would be the “special” “Movie Night”. This was as close to entertainment as we received and it consisted of a recent vintage George Clooney flick shown on the TV in the Main Lounge while bags of popcorn were handed out. But nothing was done to make this anything like an elegant or memorable event. Some of the staff was talking at the bar during important stretches of dialogue.
We love this new site and really appreciate your honesty and “No Advertising” policy. Thought your visitors considering one line versus another ought to know our favorite reason for deciding that Tauck is simply the best out there. On our cruise aboard Treasures, we noticed an unobtrusive button on the wall that, we found out, is linked to Officers cabin. If I or my wife were to fall or suffer from a sudden serious mishap, help would be on the way quickly. We found out that every cabin on Tauck is equipped with these “silent alarm” buttons. I love that Tauck thinks enough of their guests to spend the money to install this alarm system. For us, this is reason enough to travel with them.
Our cruise on the new Avalon Vista was impressive in the beginning. The ship is beautifully designed. But we would warn other river cruisers about a problem we encountered that really created an uncomfortable situation. The pillows on our bed were the cheap, hard kind used in 3-star hotels in Europe. No problem, we asked that they be changed to something softer with down or any other natural fiber. Then began a hassle that we will never repeat. We spoke to nearly everyone with any authority. The bottom line was “we can’t make changes”. No one thought to stock alternative pillows. River Boat Ratings may want to recommend that river cruisers consider bringing along pillows from home in their luggage. We missed many hours of quality sleep because of this problem. I understand that these river boats have minimal storage space, but there are any number of people with various pillow allergies and no one on Avalon seemed to care.
“We have traveled with Grand Circle four times in the past without a problem. On our last trip, however, we were due a refund for a medical situation and we began to experience the kinds of things so many others have been commenting on about this company on the internet. They clearly have a policy of putting you through so many hoops to make a claim or get a response from customer service that, I am sure, most people just give up. We kept getting shuffled off to another department and we were continually asked to put things in writing that they already had. Grand Circle has excellent tour directors. We love the people and the lectures. When everything is fine, they are a good company to travel with. But we now see why they get so many terrible reviews. When things go wrong they just aren’t there for you.
“We have to tell you that our third river boat trip was “the charm”. Like so many of our friends, we started with Viking River, which really turned us on to the concept of seeing Europe’s interior by boat, but our last trip on Uniworld’s beautiful Antoinette may have spoiled us for anything else out there. We loved the cabin decor but we particularly enjoyed the glassed in swimming pool and the really neat, old-style movie theater. Uniworld just got it right with this elegant boat. We loved the engineering, particularly the way the ceilings of the rooftop restaurant and the small nightclub could be lowered when we were approaching a low bridge. Just amazing and far more than we expected or had previously experienced.
“While we are anxious to try one of Viking River’s new Long Boats in Europe, we probably won;t because of the absolutely awful series of experience we endured with Viking in Russia aboard the Viking Ingvar. I know you do not encourage rumors or long complaint threads on Riverboat Ratings but do be cautious when you complete your review of boats to mention the many shortcomings of their boats between St. Petersburg and Moscow. I’ll just summarize by saying that the food was awful, they were always running out of things, there were no after hour “options”, menus were labeled “fish” or “pork” and the staff seemed to have never heard of the concept of “another bowl of vegetables please.” In fact, the staff was sullen and downright unfriendly. When you would walk pass them while they were talking to one another, they would never stop to say hello. They could care less. We understand that some of this is cultural, but as the largest river boat company in the world, you would think that Viking might have a worthwhile crew training program in place.
