Viking River Cruises review: Air upgrade fee

I'll try to be as brief as I can about this absolutely frustrating situation.

I do want to say, everyone I have spoken to at Viking has been professional and patient, although, in the end, not helpful in the least.

In January, I, along with my sister-in-law booked the Cities of Light trip for us and our husbands on a 3 way call with Hunter, from Viking. I am very fearful of flying and emphasized to Hunter several times that it was an absolute necessity that we are on the same flight and that we sit together. We paid extra for the air upgrade so we wouldn't have any problems getting that taken care of.

That is not what happened. My SIL got her itinerary and she called to ask if we got ours. We did not, so I called Viking and they emailed our itinerary to us.

(Not getting our itinerary is another story.) Their flights were on Delta and our flights were on Lufthansa! Thus began the saga of trying to get on the same flights.

They at first told me that we could be moved to the Delta flights, but at a cost of $800 per person. I said I would pay that to Delta, but wanted some kind of compensation from Viking because they messed up the reservations. Apparently, that is something that they will not do.

So began the 5 following calls lasting between 36 minutes and an hour and 28 minutes. Lufthansa finally agreed to move my brother and SIL from Delta without a change fee. All this time, even though Viking made the mistake, they refused to get us on flight together and absorb the change fee. So, hats off to Lufthansa! We thank you.

The big question here is, Viking is a global company, why in the world is there basically NO COMMUNICATION between the booking and air departments? We were told several times by various agents that they really have no way to communicate people's requests. I find that to be a pretty poor answer.

In this case, Viking made a mistake and they didn't want to do anything to fix it other than to shuffle us around because of change fees. That's not the right way to do business.