The Cruise Before The Cruise

We are less than a week away from departing the U.S. for our 15-night sailing aboard Viking Ocean’s newest ship, Viking Mars. The past couple of weeks have been filled with stress as we have watched our scheduled flights repeatedly be cancelled or delayed. The airlines’ inability to fulfill their obligation is making cruise travel less than pleasant right now. In addition to cancelled and delayed flights, airlines are losing more luggage than ever before: more than 220,000 pieces of luggage in April, 2022 alone! So, not only do we have to worry about making it to Stockholm to board the ship, there is a good chance that we will arrive with no luggage for 15 days!

We were able to eliminate one point of stress by having Luggage Forward ship our two “checked” bags from our home in Dallas directly to the ship in Stockholm*. We have used Luggage Forward in the past to ship our luggage and have always been pleased with their service.

We wrap our luggage in plastic before shipping.

DHL picked up our two duffel bags on Tuesday, and by Thursday afternoon we were notified that they were already in Stockholm where they will be stored safely until they are delivered to the ship. What a great service!

DHL picked up our two bags and had them in Stockholm in two days!

With our luggage concerns dealt with, we can now turn our attention to our flights. Fortunately, we booked our flights with Viking’s air department. Unfortunately, Viking has us booked on SAS from Newark to Stockholm, Sweden, and on SAS returning from Bergen to Cophenhagen where we connect to another SAS flight to Chicago, then on United back to Dallas. As luck would have it, just a few day after these flights were booked, SAS fell victim to a pilot strike and they have just filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Every flight on which we are booked has been cancelled for the past week, so our odds of making it to Stockholm on SAS are slim-to-none.

After reaching out to my contact at Viking, I learned that the air department is in the process of re-booking guests onto other partner airlines. They have presented us with an alternative itinerary which we much prefer to the original. If everything works out, we will be flying from DFW to Helsinki on Finnair, then from Helsinki to Stockholm. The return flights will be on Iberia from Bergen to Madrid where we will have to spend the night before picking up a morning flight on Iberia (operated by American Airlines) to JFK, then our final flight on American to DFW. However, as of the writing of this blog, we have not received new PNRs from Viking, so hopefully they will be able to maintain our Business Class seat reservations.

Finnair offers daily flights from DFW to Helsinki on the new Airbus A-350

I should mention that we scheduled a one-day pre-cruise stay in Stockhom prior to embarkation. This has just become our standard operating procedure after having experienced so many flight delays and cancellations. Typically, on sailings departing from a US port, we will plan an extra day on the front-end of a cruise and two days prior to cruises that require international travel. However, on this sailing, Viking Mars will overnight in Stockholm on the day of embarkation, so we only needed a single night prior to embarkation.

We have been invited to spend one night at the beautiful Hotel Rival in Stockholm, Sweden. We are very excited to see this property and will update our blog with details about our stay. The Rival is the #2 rated Stockholm hotel on Tripadvisor.com.

As for all of our other pre-cruise arrangements, we used the MyVikingJourney.com website to pre-book all of our excursions in advance as well as dinner reservations for The Chef’s Table and Manfredi’s. We have also prepaid for Viking’s Silver Spirits beverage package. So, if Viking’s air department can provide us with reliable air transportation, this is shaping up to be a very nice cruise.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for video updates throughout the cruise and we will be posting updates daily on Instagram and Facebook.

*Disclaimer: Luggage Forward is a CruiseReport sponsor and has provided one-way shipping of luggage as compensation for sponsorship. For more information, click here.