With six months between the final payment and the sailing of our World Cruise, we have a lot of time to peruse the itinerary and then look at the potential shore excursions.
Viking generously includes a shore excursion at each port, as well as offering several optional excursions at various prices. Depending upon your stateroom category, you are permitted to book these excursions about 5 months before sailing. On a cruise as long and expensive as this World Cruise, Viking offered a number of incentives, especially for early bookers.
One of the perks for us was a substantial onboard credit to be used towards optional shore excursions. At first it appeared that we would have to wait until embarkation to use the credit but, after a number of inquiries from passengers, they permitted us to use them from home, which is certainly a help.
The Viking website allows you to log in and see your entire calendar for a trip, including times in and out of port, excursions and spa treatments booked and a "wishlist" where you can store tings that you may want to purchase. Unfortunately, the site is slow and many things will not load. My guess is that there are so many visitors that it can't keep up with demand.
I went over every day's shore excursions and put the ones that we favored on to the wishlist so that I would be ready when they opened up for booking. Unfortunately, the work was mostly in vain as the wishlist would not open up. I contacted Viking and got the usual,"we are so concerned and will do everything we can to rectify the problem," but I had to go back day by day and search the excursions. Fortunately, the optional (paid) excursions did show up as having been added to the wishlist even though it was inaccessible. After booking the most desirable trips, I found that we still had quite a bit of credit remaining so now we will spend that once we get closer to the date. As we have booked a suite, we were first in priority for shore excursions, which may be helpful as some may sell out.
I did make one big mistake: signing in on the website "Cruise Critic," a site where you can access forums and boards about cruises in general, as well as read people's critiques of particular cruise lines, ships or voyages. You can also sign up for a "roll call" which deals with the voyage on which you are actually booked. I thought it might be useful but all it did was put me in touch with people who are interested in forming friendships and getting acquainted prior to the cruise. Most seem to be caught up in minutiae such as whether or not a shore excursion is sold out months before the cruise, whether Viking provides currency exchange(they don't, as it clearly says in the specs) and what they are going to pack. After some exchanges, I became certain that these may not be the people with whom I would interact past quick comments on the weather. I should have listened to Carol on this one!
While we have traveled a lot, nearly all of our trips have been independent so a cruise takes some adjustment. The best thing about a cruise is that you don't have to keep packing and unpacking and you get to visit lesser know places for short periods of time, the logistics of which would be impossible on land. The negatives are the group excursions, often involving buses and the possibility of interacting with people with whom you don't get along.
Cruise ships dock at a variety of ports, some right in the center of town and some a couple of hours away. Many frequent cruisers have a "neighborhood" mentality, as in they are in Asia so will visit Angkor Wat or the Great Wall, despite being hours away by plane. On a previous cruise, we skipped Paris and Berlin as we visit those cities often and don't wish to travel 2 or 3 hours each way to spend 5 hours in the city. We did go to Rome as there was nothing to do in the port. On this World Cruise we are sticking to the excursions that are close at hand, with the possible exception of Bangkok. We have visited Bangkok many times but, since there is nothing to do where our ship docks, we will likely take the two hour ride into the city and go about on our own.
With over 20 weeks until we depart, I think we have done as much detailed planning as is necessary. Some ports may change, some new excursions may open up or we may just change our minds. We have the excursions that we most wanted so for now I will lay this aside and pick up again closer to the sailing date.