Shipwreck - A Viking Cruise Bait & Switch

Ramble On remains homebound for now. We are trying to provide Sophie the Siamese cat with a stable home life for once. It's hard. We do have some cool shorter trips coming up: Quintana Roo, Key West, and the Dingle Penisula. But mostly, we're travel thinking, travel wondering. Along those lines, here's some practical advice, which might be a first for the blog.

You Can Take it With You

I have written a lot about trip packing in the past. It's not really something you can master, or even get very good at. Each trip is unique, and luggage... well it's universally just a bit too small for what you have laid out. There are only two thing you can be sure of with packing:

1. You will pack much too much, and that

2. You will pack way too much

But help is here. These are Conan O'Brien's packing tips and there are some good ones in there, like wear a lot of dark. And as someone who also gets his DNA from the British Isles, I think my favorite recommendation is about the sunscreen he recommends. Conan says “I like a sunscreen so powerful, it’s firing ultraviolet rays back at the sky."

Or you can go with Jack Reacher. His packing list:

1. Wallet with ATM Card

2. Folding Toothbrush

How I do it, not Reacher

Cruisin' for a Bruisin'

Per the post's headline, the Alaska Cruise we had planned for next August is off. We broke up. And I'm as bitter as Taylor Swift after John Mayer, or maybe Jake Gyllenhaal. Maybe both.

You may recall that I posted lovingly and longingly about my desire to go on every Viking Cruise in their glorious catalog. Some of that was for the obvious reason that they go to some amazing places. But there is nothing unique about that, hundreds of other travel companies do too. It was more that Viking "got me" (along with about 50 million other grey hairs). I was so enamored of them, that I actually suggested to Lori that we consider a half-year round the world journey with them (she prudently turned me down). They understood what I was looking for when it came to a catered experience and their reputation for delivering on that with their loyal customers was impeccable. Or, so I thought.

We booked the Alaska Inside Passage Cruise for August 2026. We also bought train tickets and reserved hotels leading up to our embarkation. Then I got an email in a tone so innocuous that I almost ignored it. The email stated that "due to necessary operational adjustments, certain Alaska itineraries have been slightly revised." I really wasn't worried. Total trust. I figured they had just changed some minor thing, like maybe they were supposed to make port at Dock A in Vancouver and now it would be Dock B, and only out of an abundance of rectitude did they need to inform us of this. I nearly didn't even check what the actual change was.

Turns out, it was a pretty big one. No Glacier Bay. Which, for those of you who have been there, is kind of like saying we're going to take you to Paris, for a week, but due to operational adjustments, we will not be seeing the Eiffel Tower. I mean it's a bit of a highlight, if not the highlight of the whole damn trip.

Seems like something you would want to see, as long as you were in the neighborhood, right?

At this point however, Viking's brand equity with me was still so strong that I'm thinking: "they will surely make this right somehow." At a minimum, they will explain why this happened and trip over themselves apologizing and then offer me some sort of consolation in the form of a free drinks package or something. And honestly, looking back, that's all it would have taken—just a genuine and sincere "we feel quite badly about this" even if they weren't actually going to do squat about it.

What I got instead was a non-explanation for why Glacier Bay was removed and a perfunctory apology verging on barely disguised contempt. Sometimes, success goes to people's heads. I'm sure Charlie Sheen was a pretty nice guy back in the day. Viking has been extremely successful. They have grown. They went public and are now valued at $28 billion dollars. That's Billion, with a B. Hence, their response to me seems to be: "there's plenty more where he came from." Go pound sand my friend.

After getting no information whatsoever from Viking Customer Service as to why it changed, I did a little research on my own. It seems (and I say "seems" because this could not sound less like the current presidential administration) that the National Park Service has further tightened the number of permits available to cruise ships and/or increased the permit cost to help protect this very fragile environment. And, I fully support this! Bravo! Go parks. Go nature. (Now if we could just find a way to warm the planet a little bit so that some of that impressive glacier could crash down into the ocean while I'm watching... but I digress)

Okay, so maybe there is a valid reason for the itinerary change. But... surely Viking was aware of these new restrictions when they sold the tour? Or were they just unwilling to pay the new higher price? Whatever it was, they sold me one thing and were unable, or just unwilling, to provide it, so...

This was the Viking representative I was expecting

When I suggested on the phone that I was quite surprised that their response to a significant itinerary bait and switch was that I was entitled to exactly nothing—their customer service representative went so far as to say: "It's just like the airlines when things change. There are no refunds." For a luxury cruise line to voluntarily compare themselves to the U.S. commercial airline industry suggested that they had jumped a cruise ship-sized shark somewhere along the way.

This was the Viking representative I got

Even if I had been willing to overlook the disappointment, there was zero chance I was going to get on a boat for 10-days with a company who could so callously disregard a former fanboy that had lavished praise on their company prior to even going on his first cruise. I mean how many thousands, well okay hundreds, scratch that, dozen or so people had I slavishly recommended them to already? Where's the gratitude? Where's the respect? What other nasty surprises were in store once I was on board and fully captive?

So, we took the hits on the various deposits and moved on. Cue the lyrics Taylor.

I Can't Be Tamed

My foray into guided luxury travel as a well-heeled globetrotting gentleman was vanishingly brief. I am once again a wandering lone wolf, ready to book steerage on a Greek Vaseline freighter or sleep in a student hostel with bathrooms down the hall. Lori is thrilled.

Awoooooo!