Sometimes the water levels in rivers are too high or low for a cruise to go to plan. That happened to me in Germany and in this video, I'll show you what happened.
Normally when you’re driving to a cruise port you’ll see the ship appear over the horizon and it is such an exciting feeling, that isn’t what happened on my last cruise though.
Check out TUI river cruises here, mine was called Festive Flavours and it's available next year too: https://tui-uk.7cnq.net/k0N2oV (affiliate)
When we arrived at the TUI Skyla in Germany we were in a completely different place to where we were originally meant to be board the ship, it was pitch black, freezing cold and our flight had to be diverted to a different city to get us this far, all because the water levels in the river were too high.
I booked this cruise because I wanted to go to the German Christmas markets and I thought that a river cruise would be the best way to do it. TUI are very much a budget river cruise line and this cruise was around half the price of the other big river cruise companies which meant that I could give it a go. It certainly wasn’t a cheap option but more about that later.
I’d heard so many horror stories about river cruises and water levels where people have to spend their entire trip on a bus instead of a boat so I was a little nervous.
Despite the less-than-ideal start, I was more excited than ever to get on board, our transfer bus dropped us off just before 10 pm and having not eaten for most of the day I was hoping that dinner was still being served.
The cruise was onboard TUI’s Skyla, she looked beautifully lit up and I could see the Christmas decorations on the ship through the windows. We walked into this beautiful central atrium and it only took us a few minutes to check in even though there was a whole busload of us arriving at once.
The plane that we came on was actually three river ships combined, we all flew to Germany together then got on the right buses to bring us to the different ports.
