The Viking Sky
A tour of the 930-passenger Viking Sky, our home for the first week of the journey. See our Penthouse Veranda room, restaurants throughout the ship, the two swimming pools, plus lounges, terraces, and more.
Marianne and I have had a colorful experience with European cruises. In 2018, we splurged on a Rhine River cruise that ended in drought and detours. We received a credit for a future river cruise and booked a trip on the Rhone River in France… for 2020, when COVID-19 shut everything down. In 2019, we also booked an ocean cruise from Venice to Greece with Viking… for 2021, when cruise-line operations remained suspended by the global pandemic. We rebooked both cruises and finally, in spring 2023, we were ready for our first proper cruise, taking another run at the route from Venice to Greece.
We flew from San Francisco to busy Frankfurt, then took the short flight to Venice, finishing with a slow descent over farmland south of the Italian Alps.
Cruise ships are no longer allowed to dock in Venice. So we were greeted at the Venice airport by several Viking crew members, who directed us to a coach outside. Our ship, the Viking Sky, was docked about an hour south, in the port of the old city of Chioggia.
The Viking Sky is considered a small ship in the world of gigantic amusement-park cruise lines, with their go-cart tracks and rollercoasters perched precariously atop massive moving cities with more than 8,000 citizens. The Viking Sky can accommodate 930 passengers and a crew of 550 across its nine decks, which is still plenty big.
The ship began service in 2017, and it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. In 2019, amidst strong winds and waves reaching 49 feet off the coast of Norway, the Viking Sky suffered a loss of oil pressure, forcing the engines to shut down. Over the next day, 479 passengers were rescued by a fleet of helicopters that had been hastily assembled while the ship bobbed about in the storm, furniture sliding back and forth across the decks. Three people left with serious injuries. This was the ship we had selected after losing one cruise to drought and two cruises to COVID-19. We are nothing if not optimists.
Our coach dropped us off at the dock in Chioggia, and we went through a series of passenger check-ins and security checkpoints before finding our way to our room. We had selected a Penthouse Veranda, a 338-square-foot stateroom and one of the larger rooms on the ship, with a proper little balcony.
We spent the rest of the afternoon on board, eating dinner in The Restaurant, one of six dining spots on the ship. The Viking Sky also features a fitness center, spa, theater, hair salon, shop, two pools, several bars, and a sports deck. We would have plenty to explore both on and off the ship over the next week.
