We’ve done river cruises with Viking (3 cruises), Avalon (twice), and
Vantage (once). Of these three, Avalon is our current favorite, but they don’t
sail the Douro, and Viking was pretty well booked up for spring of 2018. Also,
Vantage had a few features we liked that some of the other lines didn’t have:
1) a 7-day one-way trip down the Douro from Barca d’Alva to Porto rather than
the 7-day Porto to Porto trip that most lines offer. 2) 2 nights in Madrid and
3 in Lisbon as part of their standard package and 3) an optional 3-night
post-cruise extension on the island of Madeira.
Vantage leases the Douro Serenity (2017 was first year in
service) from Douro Azul for approximately half of the season, and it sails for other operators
for the balance of the year. Vantage typically books two consecutive weeks to
allow for a Porto-to-Barca d'Alba cruise followed by a cruise in the opposite
direction.
Booking
By October, the web-site price had gone up by $1,000 per
person. The cruise showed up as “Sold Out” on October 2.
In the months between booking and traveling, I reviewed all
the Douro reviews on CruiseCritic to get an idea of what the trip would be like
and what people liked and didn’t like about the Douro. Since there was only one
Vantage review, I focused on excursions rather than on-ship experiences. We
went ahead and booked the Toledo excursion since it’s early in the trip, and we
will decide on the other optional excursions while on the trip.
Flights
Vantage booked our flights on August 2. We requested
American Airlines through Dallas or Philadelphia when we made our initial
reservation and were given American fights through Philadelphia. We were happy
to get the routing we wanted without having to use the $100 per person Vantage
FlightChoice service. We did make a change, requesting an earlier flight out of
Nashville with a longer layover in Philadelphia. The Vantage rep made the
change with no problems—still avoiding the FlightChoice charges. We paid in
full on August 9, receiving our discount, and Vantage Air agreed to go ahead
and purchase our tickets so that we could choose the seats we wanted and
request upgrades.
When I tried to upgrade on the American Airlines web site, I
couldn’t bring up the trip. After calls to both American and Vantage, I managed to get Vantage air to change something in the
“ticketing field,” which allowed the American agent to access the reservation
and upgrade us to Main Cabin Extra, with a request for a business class upgrade
using miles and dollars. In a real surprise, the business class upgrade for the
return Lisbon-Philadelphia leg of the trip cleared in late September! Unfortunately,
business class for the trip from Philadelphia to Madrid filled up with paying
passengers a few weeks before the trip.
Vantage bought the Air Portugal (TAP) tickets for Madeira in early February, opening up
the complete reservation on American’s site. We still couldn’t reserve seats for the TAP
flights. Vantage informed us that it would cost $50 per seat per flight to
reserve seats, so we passed on reserved seats for the 2 hour flight.
Documents
Vantage doesn’t mail documents; you’d think that a company
that does so much direct mail advertising wouldn’t scrimp on mailing documents.
Instead, Vantage makes final documents available for download 3 weeks before
departure. Documents actually appeared on the web site 30 days before
departure, and they were something of a disappointment. Almost everything in
the “documents” was already available on the web site. The only new information
was the phone number for the ship. Around 3 weeks before we left we received a nice
email from our cruise director, Eleuterio, with additional details along with
his contact information. So as I post this, we're 3 days away from departure. More later from Madrid!
