This is a brief update on our planning progress. Since my last post a few months ago, there have been significant developments. With only 49 days until our departure, we have secured our flights, initiated the visa process, booked most of our planned excursions, and made several reservations at Viking's specialty restaurants.
Michelle, our travel consultant from Cruise and Travel Experts, has been incredibly supportive in ensuring a seamless journey. She successfully arranged our preferred flights. Although Viking includes airfare in their packages, the options for carriers and routes can be limited. Thanks to Michelle, we now have direct flights with Delta from Atlanta to Los Angeles and from London back to Atlanta. A big thank you to Michelle!
GenVisa is the visa processing service utilized by Viking for their included visa package. Our experience with GenVisa has been straightforward and efficient. We also needed to obtain an Australian E-visa on our own, which was processed without any issues.
Booking excursions proved to be more challenging. Viking employs a priority system for excursion bookings based on cabin category; since ours is in the lower tier of the top third, about 300 passengers had access before us. Therefore, we had to be ready when our booking window opened if we wanted to secure our desired excursions. Additionally, all four of us wanted to participate in the same excursions. Janet managed her bookings while I handled ours, and we were prepared when the booking window opened at 3 PM on the designated day. Unfortunately, Viking's website was not user-friendly or transparent, resulting in over two hours of effort to finalize our bookings, with a few excursions still unavailable together. One of Viking's representatives informed Janet that changes might be possible once onboard.
Making dining reservations at the specialty restaurants was similarly complicated. Fortunately, they permitted one person to book for both couples. The main hurdle was again the website; we could only advance book one reservation per cruise segment for each restaurant without clear information on what those segments were. After contacting her Viking representative, Michelle provided us with the necessary segment dates. However, during the first booking attempt, the website required a "Cruise Day" instead of an actual date, which begins on our first day in LA. I had to look up the "Cruise Day" for each reservation date we wanted to make, making it more difficult than necessary.
We also received information from Luggage Forwarding, the company Viking partners with for complimentary shipping of two pieces of luggage directly to the ship before departure. Arrangements are set for our luggage pickup on December 13th, which will lighten our load for flying—great news!
On a positive note, I had a pleasant experience arranging transportation to and from Atlanta Airport yesterday with Top Hat Limo in Woodstock, GA. We have relied on Top Hat for airport transport many times before. Jan was exceptionally helpful during our call. It is comforting to feel assured that our transport will be ready upon our return four months after booking. Thank you, Jan!
We still have various planning tasks ahead regarding mail, taxes and many other items, but overall things are coming together.
I’ll conclude this rather mundane update here; it serves more as a personal future reference for me than for your reading enjoyment. Please excuse me!
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