Good news for you, most of the major cruise lines no longer offer 2x/day cleaning. You can choose morning or later in the day, but not both.
We’ve been on two Viking Ocean cruises and have more booked. Our first was a full transit through the Panama Canal and our most recent one was Into the Midnight Sun from Bergen to Greenwich. We have deposits down on Chilean Fjords in December 2026 and Pharaohs & Pyramids in November 2027 (which is a land/river trip). Viking runs pretty frequent “sales” with $25 pp deposits. The main benefit of booking onboard is you get that $25 deposit plus some onboard credit for the cruise you’re currently on when you do the onboard booking.
When we were on our last one (Midnight Sun) we actually made quite a few friends onboard and remarked how friendly people were. One group talked us into booking on an Iconic Iceland itinerary and date they’d chosen for 2026. When we got home we had second thoughts so we switched the date to the same Iceland itinerary a year later, then had more second thoughts and decided to change it completely for the Egypt cruise. Since these changes were in advance of final payment it was pretty easy to keep moving that $25 deposit around. I like the Viking system of offering low deposits but making you pay earlier (usually at 6 months once you’re a repeat Viking customer). That works for us because we like to plan about 2 years in advance and we also like to book our own air, so by the time the cruise is 6 months out we’re pretty committed.
We also have upcoming cruises on Celebrity (New Zealand in March 2026) and Princess (Singapore to Tokyo in March 2027) so we haven’t completely abandoned the larger cruise ships, especially when sailing with friends or family who don’t want to pay for Viking.
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I think we’ve traded comments before as we ret’d from our first Viking Grand European River Cruise in October and fell in love with Viking and the river cruise model. I thought I would try Viking first and then switch to try Avalon or AMA but we’ve already signed up for another Viking river cruise in 2027. I do want to do an ocean cruise as well and love hearing about your experience. We made good friends on our river cruise, some we plan to travel with in the future - hope it holds, we’ve all been communicating over the holidays anyway. People really are so nice and you just need to see they are out there because the news has been so difficult to listen to lately and makes you just a tad cynical, me anyway.
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