AS a continuation of our last post, we were barely back from our Transatlantic Cruise on Viking Ocean Cruises when we received an email from Viking about a sale on their Expedition Cruises to Antarctica. It was a short 5 day sale, and included free airfare for several dates in January and February of 2023, just a few weeks away.
After we did some research, and determined that we really thought we could go, we booked a cruise for February 18, 2023. We initially placed placed that reservation on a 24 hour hold while we tried to figure out the final logistics of actually going on this trip since it was only about six weeks away. There were not many cabins left and most of the ones available in the lower cabin classifications (more affordable) were down located on lower decks and in either the very forward or aft locations on the ship.
We could not figure out all of the logistics by the time the reservation hold expired, so we started looking again, and now the lowest cost cabins for that date were completely sold out.
We then determined that the February 8, 2023 cruise start date for the Viking Octantis Ship might fit our plans better anyway. We put that cruise on a 24 hour hold and continued to try and figure out if we could actually go. This reservation was for a Guarantee Cabin in the lowest cabin classification, N2.
Part of what we needed to investigate was hotel availability and flights to the initial starting point for the trip, Buenos Aires, Argentina. We knew we wanted to go early, so that requires a payment of a $100 Deviation Fee to Viking per person, it is just the way they operate their flights. Also, we never want to arrive “just in time” for a cruise that far away and worry about our luggage making it, and without a deviation, that is how Viking schedules your arrival, generally the day of sailing.
In the case of this cruise, Viking actually schedules your arrival in Buenos Aires the day ahead of your actual cruise embarkation, and includes a one night hotel stay in the Hilton in Buenos Aires before the cruise starts. That is required because they charter flights to the actual city of departure for the cruise, Ushuaia, Argentina, about 3.5 hours of flight time south of Buenos Aires. These charter flights leave very early, so they make all of the arrangements for everyone from the Hilton Hotel to the airport to catch these chartered flights.
Another Viking peculiarity is that if you want to also pick your flight connections, you pay another fee called Air Plus, which is an additional $150.00 per person. This generally allows you to pick your own flights as long as they fit into the cost profile. We needed to know some possible flight times before we booked so that we could make informed flight reservation decisions at the time of booking.
We were able to gather all of the required information to make a decision, and booked the cruise on January 6, 2023 for departure to Buenos Aires on February 5, 2023. The actual Viking cruise portion of the trip starts on February 8, 2023. The cruise ends on February 20, 2023, and we arrive home the next day after an overnight flight from Buenos Aires.
We were able to keep the Guarantee Cabin in category N2, but that means we will not know which cabin we are in until the day we board the ship, or possibly a few days earlier. Since this is the lowest classification of cabin, we also do not get to make any reservations for the specialty restaurants until we board the ship, but based on our experience in the Viking Neptune Transatlantic Cruise, that was not of much benefit, our two “included” reservations for that trip were only available at 8:30 PM, and we had to change them to an earlier time once we boarded that cruise. It was not much of a benefit in the end for that cruise.
That will be all for this post, I will include more information on our flights and the experience I had getting those reservations in the next post, as well and some more detail on the cruise itself.
As always, we will include an Itinerary Post showing the entire trip in a later post.