We paid for steak. Vantage served hamburger. While it was not Vantage’s fault that low water on the Rhine caused the first week of our two week cruise to turn into a bus tour, it was Vantage’s fault in how they incompetently coped with the crisis.
Vantage staff lied in telling me there was no problem when I called them 3 days before departure and asked if there was a low water problem.
When, less than 24 hours before departure, Vantage called & told me that half the cruise would be turned into a bus trip, I said I wanted to utilize Vantage’s (expensive) trip cancellation insurance and rescheduled the same trip for next year, Vantage said they would transfer the $7,000+ paid for this year to next year’s trip and then I would have to pay an additional $6,000+ to make the change.
But the biggest mess Vantage made was the way they adjusted to conversion from ship to bus travel. They stuck us in a second rate hotel in Basel, one of the most boring cites in the world for tourists, for 5 nights. Double rooms in the hotel were smaller than the single cabins on the ship and lacking in amenities.
Every day they sent us out by bus from Basel, the scheduled start of the cruise to the ports were were missing. On the sixth day, we had an 11-12 hour bus trip to Koblenz to finally meet the ship. The length of the daily bus rides would have been reduced by as much as four hours if Vantage had put us up in Strasbourg instead of in Basel, and we would have been located in a major tourist center rather than in a backwater (Basel).
Because Vantage chose to house us in the most inconvenient possible location for the trip, we wasted so much time in bus rides that a large number of scheduled events had to be canceled – instead of seeing the promised sights, we were riding a bus.