Having already booked a Rhine River Cruise with 10 of our friends, we decided to book a "pre-cruise" before we met everybody in Basel. Thus we booked the Hermod for a Danube cruise before the Rhine cruise.
The issues we had with Viking involved the corporate side of things. They combined our two bookings into a single booking. When this happened, we lost our transfer from Passau to Munich. After multiple phone calls and conference calls with her home agency and Viking, our travel agent thought it to be all worked out. Viking was going to transfer us to the airport. Apparently, not the case as our Hermod staff asked us about our transfer plans in Passau. All the stress of the previous weeks about the transfer came rushing back. To the credit of the amazing Hermod shipboard staff, they got it worked out and we were transferred to Munich as we had originally planned.
Being our first Viking Cruise, we had no other yardstick from which to measure.
Due to the lateness of our reservation, the only room available to us was a lower level porthole room. The room was a bit tight but had the same high quality amenities and furnishings as other staterooms. In actuality, we were so busy on excursions and other activities, we didn't spend that much time in the room anyway.