How to find records of cruise ship planned vs actual itineraries?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I recently went on a Viking cruise that was scheduled to sail from Bergen, Norway, to the Norwegian cities of Alta and Tromso (above the Arctic Circle), then Narvik, Amsterdam, and London.

Because of heavy storms in the North Sea, the Norwegian stops were changed (even before we left Bergen, we later discovered) to Trondheim, Kristiansand, Stavanger, and Eidfjord. So excursions and activities in the original ports that we had planned, and been very much looking forward to for a year, were canceled.

The good news is that we were able to see the Northern Lights – the main reason for the trip – from the ship on the first two nights.

Needless to say, most of the passengers were very disappointed by the changes, which had also happened on five previous sailings of this ship in the preceding months. So for the current season, this cruise is batting .000. And it is clear that many previous years’ cruises have been forced to divert as well.

Of course, we understand that weather cannot be perfectly predicted, and that the safety of the ship, passengers, and crew come first, as Viking was quick to assure us.

But it seems as if a large percentage of the sailings with this itinerary have not actually completed it as scheduled. So the question becomes, Is Viking selling something it can’t deliver?

What I want to find out is, how many of Viking’s “In Search of the Northern Lights” cruises have actually made it to all or most of their scheduled stops? If it was less than, say, 50%, I would have liked to have known that before I spent many thousands of dollars to book the trip.

But answering that question turns out not to be so simple. Viking knows, of course, but I don’t expect they’d answer with complete stats.

What I know of other recent sailings comes from the Cruise Critic threads on those trips. But when I started looking there for older trips, I found that there are almost 100 threads, each with dozens or hundreds of posts. Combing through all the chaff in that mass of material would be a time-consuming slog.

So I started looking for other online resources. I use an app called Marine Traffic. Indeed, it is how I knew our ship was going to Trondheim instead of Alta hours before the captain informed us. The app tracks thousands of ships, and offers history, but the Pro version ($69/month) only provides 30 days of history, and the Enterprise version, which provides five years (just what I need), doesn’t cite a price: you have to ask them for a quote. So big bucks.

If you or anyone you know has access to such an account, please let me know!

I found a few other cruise-oriented online databases, but they only provide info on future trips, not past history.

It’s not even simple to find a list of which ships made that cruise on which dates.
I tried using the Wayback Machine to search Viking.com for that info, but couldn’t, because the site doesn’t list them on static pages, and to find the page for a particular trip you have to go deeper than WM crawled.

So do you have any suggestions? What I’m specifically looking for is:

  • List of sailings of Viking’s “In Search of the Northern Lights” over the past few years, with ship names, dates, and scheduled itineraries.

  • List the the actual ports those ships called in on those dates.

I welcome your suggestions.

2

I would ask Viking management how often they are able to even partially complete this particular itinerary. As you stated, they certainly know the answer to that question. They may not respond, but what have you got to lose?

The bigger question is whether they knew their itinerary was unrealistic and stuck with it anyway in hopes of luring unsuspecting passengers like you. The only way to know that is to find somebody who works for Viking who has that information. Good luck with that.

Given all the blow-back they must receive from disappointed passengers like you, and the associated bad press, I really doubt they would intentionally mislead anyone… but you never know.

3

I & my GF were on the same cruise with the OP. At his suggestion. Hi anonymous IRL friend!!

We had a good time on the alternate itinerary but would never have bought what we got had it been accurately advertised.

Lots of grumbling and noises about class action lawsuits among the passengers. Who collectively paid about US$10M for the cruise. Enough is enough.

Ref @dolphinboy the company is Swiss, is owned by a rather piratical Norwegian former McKinsey consultant to Russian oligarchs, and predominantly sells to Americans. All that diversity pretty well ensures they’re beyond the reach of what we historically think of as consumer protection regulations.

Paging @Princhester who’s a maritime lawyer and the Dope’s general shipping expert. If anyone had access to that sort of history or knows where to find it, it’s probably him.

4

I don’t have enough requirement for old track data to subscribe to the enterprise version of Marinetraffic. If I need that data I would just ask my client for it (they usually have access).

Two thoughts -

Many ports have publicly available ship call data. I would be surprised if they made old records publicly available, but you could try.

The cost of obtaining enterprise access to Marinetraffic would be high, but you may find that they would quote you a reasonable cost for the historical data for one ship.

That’s all I got.

5

Thank you for your professional insight. Not the answer I might have preferred but the answer I reasonably expected.

6

I searched for this for cruise lines in general, and all I found was the AI saying it would be hard to find. I suspect it happens fairly frequently. On one cruise we missed an island when we got stuck in the Orinoco river. (Which was cool.) On another we didn’t dock at the cruise lines private island because of high seas. On our Viking river cruise we would up docking far from the town because of low water in the Rhine, and the year before people got bused around low water areas of rivers which would have been a pain.
I suspect this is going to get worse with more storms due to climate change. The Caribbean and North Sea are going to get worse.
They do need something like the on time departure metric you get for airplanes in the US.

7

One other thought - there are numerous companies that record and store raw AIS data and will provide it for a price. Marinetraffic is merely one of the more public-facing and layperson friendly ones.

You might find that if you asked a few of them what it would cost for them to give you X years of data for a particular ship, you might get reasonable quote (a few hundred dollars maybe?). I’d tell then you are wanting the data for personal reasons (they may give it cheaper if they know you are not in business).

Beware that they may well store all data and AIS sends data every few seconds, so a few years’ data is a lot of data. You might want to ask them about sending you one datapoint per hour or something.

The raw data may not be immediately human-readable but if you are reasonably tech-savvy you can find tools to read and display it.

8

My wife and I took that cruise in March, 2024 and hit all the scheduled ports (except storms delayed our arrival in the Netherlands so the only tour was a short one by bus to the countryside around the port - no Amsterdam). Alta, Tromso and Narvik were really nothing to write home about and most of the History revolves around the German occupation during WWII.

If it makes you feel better, I visited those alternative ports on a Baltic cruise in 2017, and they were more interesting than the Arctic towns. And you got to seethe Northern Lights! The only Northern Lights we saw were ones put through a filter on our phones.

9

Yet weather patterns can be interpreted and if a small blue water cruiser like a sailboat/catamaran can schedule an ocean passage around the weather ( by using simple weather apps )waiting for a better weather window to set sail, surely the billion dollar industry of cruise ships has all the sophisticated tools to analyze and sort out upcoming weather conditions before they leave port. But they’ve already sold the trips.

I’d say the cruise line knows way in advance the likely success of reaching their destinations.

10

Thanks. Yours is the first evidence I have that that cruise has been completed successfully, but only because I haven’t looked very deeply yet.

And it wasn’t so much the towns we regretted missing as the excursions we had planned: two land-based trips to chase the aurora, a ride with sled dogs, another with reindeer, a tour of the Sorrisniva ice hotel, and dinner in their restaurant. (The ice hotel declined to refund our $60/pp fee for the tour, because they said they had hired extra people and the ship had not made it there once this season.)

Although my wife resourcefully found several other very nice excursions at short notice in the cities we did visit, and we paid Viking’s exorbitant price for a bus trip to the famous Flam railway, we had been looking forward for most of a year to all those original activities, and were quite disappointed to miss out on them.

Thanks all for other suggestions. I’ll check them out.

11

As the Spanish Armada discovered 500 years ago or so, the North Sea and its surrounding environs can be a very treacherous area so, by its very nature, that seems like a very iffy cruise. I’m sure the fine print on their contracts protects them from financial loss in those cases, but they should be up front and definitive about their high failure rate for that particular cruise.

Hurricane Flossie almost seriously disrupted my 2007 Hawaiian cruise but, fortunately, it chose a direction away from the islands. Even when you visit paradise, you never know for sure. The best thing for planning is to see what time of year is calmest for the area you want to cruise. The rest is luck.

12

Agree as a general matter.

But when the specific goal is to visit where / when northen lights are at their visible peak, that kinda requires going to the arctic in winter. A time / place famous for bad weather.

I and others on the cruise knew our odds were not 100%. But we never dreamed they would be both <~10% and totally undisclosed. That’s what’s triggering the hostility.

An IRL friend of mine did the same cruise last year. Which ran as planned. I don’t know the specific dates, but deep in winter.

Speaking just for me, my next northen lights expedition will be by plane & train, not boat.

13

The biggest problem with a “Northern Lights” cruise in Norway is that the time of year they are most likely to occur is also the cloudiest time of the year. I kept looking at weather maps and the whole sea around there was covered right up to the coast. If you want a good chance to see the Northern Lights in Norway, stay as far away from the sea as possible.

That’s the smart way, but I think a lot of people want to have the cruise experience as some kind of consolation if they strike out on the lights.

14

And rightfully so. When a failure rate is anywhere close to being that high, it has to be highlighted by the company before hand.

15

A week-ish ago I received an email that they were offering everyone a $1,000 per person credit for use on any future voyage. The cruise fare was roughly $8K/person, so a ~12% coupon usable only for more of their product. I’m nobody special here; I assume every passenger received the same email.

Today I received an email that said in pertinent part:

We have reviewed guest responses to our earlier communication over the last few weeks.

We strive to deliver a memorable and enriching experience on every voyage. While elements like the weather are beyond our control, we share in your disappointment that your overall experience did not meet expectations, particularly given Viking’s high standards.

In light of these circumstances, we have reassessed the impact the weather had on your journey and are pleased to inform you that we will be increasing the compensation previously offered to you from $1,000 per guest to 50% of your paid cruise fare

I especially like the bland “we have reviewed guest responses”. I’m sure you did. I’m also sure some HQ folks’ hair is still singed from what they read.

I wonder if this itinerary will be offered next year? I’m betting not.

Now to pick another cruise with these folks. Ref @Jasmine’s fine advice I’m thinking a fair weather destination at a favorable time of year.

16

I get tons of emails from cruise lines. I’ve been getting them for cruises in 2026. I’m pretty sure they have no idea what the weather will be for these cruises beyond a general sense of what it’s like at that time of year in that region.

We’re booked for a cruise in July going to Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. When I go to Accuweather for July, all I can get is historic average high and low temperatures. Should I expect more than that from Holland America? Am I entitled to anything if an early season hurricane should make its way that far north and affect our itinerary? Frankly, all I’d expect is a refund of the port fees and excursions for any stop we can’t make. And maybe an extra dessert at dinner…

17

“We strive to deliver a memorable and enriching experience on every voyage.”

Well, they told the truth that it will definitely be “memorable”, but “enriching”? Not so much, I’m afraid. LOL