Cruising Down The Rivers, Europe May 2024

MS L'Europe

Dates of trip:

30th April 2024 - 20th May 2024

I have rarely posted trip reports in the past few years; I am afraid I got side-tracked by other things. I will begin again with my most recent trip. Last May I spent three weeks on a river cruise from Strasbourg to Constanta on the Black Sea along the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers. I'll open with a report on the boat and the company. 

I chose CroisiEurope for several reasons: their single supplement was less excessive than other river cruises and I was able to combine two cruises of 12 days from Strasbourg to Budapest followed by 9 days from Budapest to the Danube Delta. That became a seamless 21 day cruise. Another advantage was that all meals and most drinks were included but excursions were not. That kept the costs down by allowing me to choose the excursions I preferred without paying to visit towns I had seen previously. I enjoyed the cruise but there were pros and cons. 

The forward lounge

The pros included: 

• Cabin. My French Balcony cabins on MS L'Europe, initially double then twin, had comfortable beds and reasonable space but the showers were very cramped. 
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• Adults only. I doubt there were any passengers under 30. As an old curmudgeon that suited me fine. I don't think it was an active company policy, just that the cruise activities were not designed for children or adolescents. 
• Excellent food. The company promotes their culinary standard and I enjoyed most of the meals, even though as a diabetic I chose to leave some of the high-carb sides and desserts on the plate. 
  
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• Alcohol included. The choices of wines and beers were limited but acceptable and ordinary spirits were included. Higher priced options were available for payment. 
• Navigation staff were excellent but rarely seen after initial introductions. 
• Service staff were always polite and did their jobs well.
• Hospitality staff tried hard within limitations. 
• The trip itself. I loved watching the world pass by as we slowly and quietly cruised by. The many locks; changing landscapes; occasional ancient ruins on hills; wandering through small towns I had not been to before; coffee and snacks (and authentic gulyas) in little cafes; chatting to locals in mutually incomprehensible languages punctuated by lots of gestures and smiles; planning ways to use public transport in Strasbourg, Vienna and Budapest; etc etc. Those aspects of travelling tend to outweigh all the cons for me. But I’ll list them anyway to help anyone considering a river cruise. 
  
  
  

  

  
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The cons included: 

• Language. The French company advertises that all staff speak at least English and some are multilingual. That may be true but only a small number of English-speakers were on board the boat and we found all announcements began with a long statement in French followed by a much briefer English version. This became worse when a large group from Brazil joined the second cruise and a long Portuguese announcement was added before the English version. On some excursions, possibly to save money, a bilingual guide was used in the same way: a long French description followed by a very short English version. Some excursions had a dedicated English guide, but not all. That became very frustrating for all the English speakers. 
• Management Inflexibility. A couple of examples. I had paid for an excursion to the Danube Delta when booking the trip. About ten days in I discovered by chance that we were no longer going to that region because of the proximity to the Ukraine border and we were now going to Constanta, further south on the Black Sea. A wise decision but I could not get approval from the ship's management to change excursions or a refund. Eventually a change to the Constanta excursion required several emails back to my Australian booking agent who contacted CroisiEurope head office. Another example. I had worked out a method to reach Bucharest from our final port of Oltenitsa in Romania using a cab to the local rail station, train to an outer Bucharest suburb and another cab to the centre. At disembarkation I and several others found that buses had been arranged direct to Bucharest for several groups. There were plenty of vacant seats but when we asked if we could pay to join the buses we were told that was not possible as we should have booked those before the boat trip. Our trip took several more hours than theirs.
• No laundry Facilities. There were absolutely no laundry facilities for passengers, I even tried bribing the housekeeping staff without success. Making life more difficult the sailing schedule from Strasbourg to Budapest rarely had us in a port near a laundrette long enough to do the job. I became aware of this after booking and bought a “travel clothesline” but doing this every few days and ducking under damp clothes to use the bathroom became a pain. After using a nearby laundrette in Budapest the second trip included some suitable ports with nearby laundrettes. 
  
• Entertainment. Two excellent musicians & vocalists were on board and performed during the complete trip. They were good but I expected more variety to fill 21 days on board. I hoped for some form of local entertainment as we passed through many countries. Instead we only had one night, which was quite good, as we passed through Bulgaria. On other nights and some afternoons apart from the two musicians we had the sort of party games I would have expected in a retirement home. The hospitality staff tried hard but there is a limited amount of entertainment in repeated word games, name-that-town, name-that-song and similar games. Luckily I enjoy reading and had loaded enough books on my kindle app to fill my evenings. But it was disappointing.
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