Scenic Luxury Cruises and Tours - UK
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Good in parts, but too much time spent on coaches
I’ve had a couple of weeks to reflect upon our Danube river cruise holiday on ‘Scenic Amber’ from July 21st until July 28th. In essence we were unlucky, as we couldn’t navigate to several of the locations which were on our itinerary because the water levels were too low. Instead, we were put on coaches to get to these places. This happened on several occasions, which was disappointing and very tiring because I felt at times we were on a glorified coach tour, rather then enjoying cruising down the Danube. The anti climax to our holiday was our last two days, as our boat literally couldn’t move, so we were stuck at Passau, near an industrial area, staring at a grey harbour wall. I can’t blame Scenic River Cruise holidays for the low level of the Danube waters, but our holiday got off to a really bad start as our flight from Heathrow to Budapest was put back three times - and instead of leaving Heathrow at 9:30 in the morning and arriving in Budapest at midday, our plane didn’t leave the airport until 3:15pm. Hence we didn’t arrive at our boat in Budapest until 8:30pm, which meant we missed all of the first afternoon and evening of our holiday, including a ‘meet and greet’ passenger party. We barely made dinner, which was hurriedly eaten because we were all exhausted! Nevertheless, the food was excellent on board the boat and the staff were brilliant. However, there was virtually no live entertainment aboard the boat in the evening, except for one night where we had a large group of male folk dancers, ‘slapping their thighs’ for an interminable length of time, until we were bored rigid. Surely, Scenic could employ a pianist and a singer to perform some live music. The highlights? We very much appreciated the delights of Vienna, spending a memorable evening in the city where we attended a classical musician concert. Also, Budapest was a joy to visit. However, our Danube river holiday experience was not the magical experience I expected. I wanted to go to Salzburg, but the coach journey there and back would have been well over four hours, so we declined to go. By the end of the cruise I was fed up with constantly going on long coach trips. I won’t be going on another river cruise. Also, when you are very close to so many other passengers, the chances of catching an infection like Covid is so much greater. Indeed, when my wife and I returned home from our river cruise, because we had Covid, we were at home self isolating for five days. Overall, I was disappointed with the cruise. It was nothing like I had imagined. Geoff McAuliffe