About two weeks ago, Stephanie and I had been looking at some great pricing on Viking Cruises for an 18-Day Panama Canal trip from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles. Well, at least “great” in comparison to paying full fare on Viking. We talked about the trip, but since it started on December 23, we would be gone over Christmas, and that was a concern for not being at home to be with our mothers over the Christmas holiday. That trip went off sale at the end of September, so we just wrote it off as a missed opportunity. Airfare was included, and the pricing was relatively low for a Viking Ocean cruise, and there was double past guest discounts.
We spent one evening talking about how we should structure our vacations and juggle our time we needed to be home to take care of both of our moms. Holidays are always a sensitive issue, and we were worried our moms would be disappointed if we were gone. What if it was their last Christmas. In the end, we decided that we just could not live our lives thinking that way, we don’t know what the future holds for them, or for us, so we decided we needed to travel if the opportunity came up again, we need to get away ourselves and still enjoy our lives as we also take care of our elderly mothers.
After that discussion, I looked into the cruise again, but the special pricing was no longer available, so that was that, but we had at least come to a conclusion on what we would do if the opportunity came along again in the future. We had specifically looked at a Panama Canal Cruise because that is something Stephanie has never done. In addition, we would be visiting some ports that she had never gone to previously, and even a few new ones for me. I had done a Panama Canal Cruise with mom and dad in 1999, on the Sky Princess, which was my very first Princess Cruise. It had also sailed from Ft. Lauderdale, but had ended in Acapulco, Mexico, a favorite cruise destination at that time.
About a week later, I received another email from Viking, and apparently, there was another similar special being offered for the Panama Canal Holiday Cruise. The only difference was that there was no double discount for past passengers listed as part of the special pricing. Now we had to really make a decision, especially after all of the discussion we had on how we needed to move forward with our own travel plans. When I looked at the Promo Code from Viking, it looked similar, so maybe I had not looked correctly at the pricing for this cruise at the beginning of October, thinking the special had ended. I had been certain that the other special had ended on the last day of September, maybe it had just been extended, but no matter the reason, it was back.
I went ahead and booked a “guarantee cabin” in the Veranda Category, the least expensive cabin there is, with a 24-hour courtesy hold. We needed to figure out a few things and run the trip by our mothers just to make sure we were not really causing an emotional issue by being gone for Christmas. Also, Stephanie needed to make sure she could get off from work over the Christmas and New Year holidays, which is a high demand time off period at her workplace. She normally always works over one or both of these holidays, so we were hoping she would not run into any problems being off since she had not been off for an extended amount of time over these particular holidays since she started working there 10 years ago.
In the end, it all worked out and we made the commitment to go and booked the cruise. We had to immediately make the full cruise fare payment since the cruise departure was not that far off. We will fly down to Ft. Lauderdale on Saturday, December 23, 2023 to board the Viking Neptune Cruise ship. The cruise is 18-nights, and we disembark in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024.
We decided not to do any pre or post cruise extensions, either through Viking (they are expensive), or on our own. We certainly don’t need to be gone any longer than the cruise duration itself, and we did not really have any desire to extend our time in Los Angeles right now, maybe another time we can go there as part of another trip. Plus, extending the trip outside of a Viking sponsored stay evokes what Viking calls a a flight deviation, and that is usually an additional cost of $150 per person.
The next item to get done was choosing our flights. This is always a point of contention with Viking cruises, and not the most pleasant experience to go through. There is something called the Viking Air + service, which gives us an opportunity to try to select our specific flights, well sort of, for an additional cost of $100 per person. Nothing can be done with scheduling actual flights until the deposit is made, and in this case, since we were so close to the departure date, that really meant full payment.
I had already looked at available one way flights to Ft. Lauderdale on December 23, the day we need to board the Viking Neptune ship, and also for one way flights back from Los Angeles on January 9, 2024, when we disembark the ship. We already knew there was some limitation on how early we could book a flight the day we get off the ship. There needs to be sufficient time for custom’s, immigration, and transport from the port in Long Beach to the Los Angeles Airport. On the last cruise, terminating in Ft. Lauderdale, there was a limitation that we could not book a return flight earlier than 11:00 AM.
On the front end, we needed to be on the ship about an hour before the scheduled departure time of 5:00 PM, but we were looking at flights that arrived much earlier and unfortunately, that also meant leaving from home very early in the morning. That was fine, we would have plenty of time to rest once we were on the ship.
As expected, flights were a little pricy going to Ft. Lauderdale that close to Christmas. Also, we knew that there were most likely several cruises departing that morning, it was the same date that we arrived in Ft. Lauderdale on our Viking Transatlantic cruise last year, and we were very surprised that the port in Ft. Lauderdale was full of ships, and that resulted in a very crowded airport. We found out that apparently, about two days before Christmas is the perfect time for new holiday cruises to begin.
We selected some really early departing flights, a couple of them arriving in Ft. Lauderdale around 11:00 AM, but leaving from the airport at home around 6:00 AM, and connecting through either Charlotte on American Airlines or Atlanta on Delta. They were not terribly priced, about $350 per person, one way. There were not a lot of choices for flights that would get us there in the early afternoon, many were arriving at our around the time the ship departed, so they were obviously not an option.
The return flights from Los Angeles were much less, about $188 per person one way. Altogether, the flights we were looking at totaled less than the $799 flight amount that was slashed through on the Viking booking site for this cruise and replaced with “Free Flights” as part of the promotion on the online reservation system.
With all of my flight information written down, I called into the Viking Air reservation line. This is when all of the fun starts. I immediately informed the representative that I had several flights selected, and that I wanted to know if my selections were “available’, and I defined available as being flights we could select without any additional cost. The last time I went through this exercise for a Viking Cruise, I was told the flights I wanted were available, but for a substantial additional cost, and that was to what I considered to be “free” airfare.
The representative asked for both the flights I wanted, to Ft. Lauderdale, and the return from Los Angeles. Of course, neither was available under their contract rate without additional cost. Then I requested if we could do just one flight at a time, making it easier to keep up with since all of the flight info she was providing to me was verbal, and a little hard to keep up with over the phone.
I requested some of the least expensive alternatives I had found on Google flights, but none were available under their contracted fare. The amount that we would have to pay was almost as much as the flights if we just purchased it ourselves, maybe only $100 less. That was no bargain, especially since we were already paying $100 each for the ability to select our flights ourselves. I finally asked what was available for no additional cost, and there was a flight on Delta leaving from Columbia at 8:50 AM and arriving in Ft. Lauderdale at 1:25 PM. We selected that flight even though we wanted to arrive earlier, but at least we were not leaving at 6:00 AM.
Then we worked on the return flight from Los Angeles. I asked about the departure time, and the earliest allowed departure flight was 12:00 PM. That time constraint eliminated a couple of flights we had selected. In the end, we were able to select a departing flight at 2:10 PM, with an arrival in Columbia at 11:55 PM. Again, there were not a lot of choices, nothing we could select arrived home much earlier without leaving before the 12:00 PM departure restriction. At least we were not arriving early the next morning after a really long overnight layover somewhere, which is always a possibility when flying from the west coast. In the end, I am not sure we really gained anything by paying the additional Air + fee to select our flights versus them being selected by Viking. Maybe we received some benefit on the return flight, but there was a lot of risk for Viking to put us on a later arriving flight to Ft. Lauderdale, a delay would mean holding up the ship’s departure.
I just wish Viking had a better system for selecting flights. At least something online. However, we have found out that booking cruises close to the departure date does impact the availability of flights under the Viking contracted rate, which makes sense. Had we booked this cruise earlier, we would have had more selection of flights. They do state that once the flights are selected under normal timing, you can use their online MyVikingJourney to change flights and see any additional costs before making the final choice. This is usually available before the flights are actually ticketed. We have never booked anything with Viking that far in advance to see that in action.
For this trip, the Viking Air representative even informed me that these flights would be ticketed immediately to lock in the pricing and availability.
It was not the worst experience we have had with Viking Air, each time we go through this process with Viking we learn a little about how it all works using Viking Air. I do think it is a little misleading to fabricate up a flight cost amount they show you when they say they are offering “free airfare”, it obviously has nothing to do with any real flight allowance dollar amount, many of the flights we selected that were not available under Viking’s contract with the airlines were well within that amount we were supposedly saving.
I did go ahead and select seats while I had the rep on the phone, seats were a little limited, but it was one less thing to worry about. Once the flights are actually in the system for the Airlines, I usually can go to the airline site with the reservation number and select seats anyway, but with the flights this close, it was worth getting it done upfront.
We will post the Cruise Itinerary in the next post.
NOTE: We are trying out a new WordPress Theme for this blog, as well as for our Iceland Trip in 2024. The theme is the basis for the overall look of the blog. The theme we have been using for the past several trips, “Travelify”, is no longer being updated by the author, which also happened with the themes we used prior to Travelify. There are security issues with the older themes when they are not updated, so that makes it necessary for us to find something more current that fits into a similar look and layout. The theme we are using now is called “Virtue”.
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