As part of our visit to Vienna, we were interested in taking a short Danube cruise. Via online searching, there seemed to be 3 options: 1 - A weeklong cruise on Viking 2 - A dinner cruise near Vienna (poor scenery along the river there) 3 - Travel a bit out of the city to see a scenic stretch of the river. We opted for this one. I'll preface the rest with this: it was VERY difficult for me to schedule this. I tried 2 different computers and 3 different browsers but could NOT get the cruise line's website to let me order tickets! I eventually called them and the lady who answered was very helpful. She reserved the cruise that I wanted and offered that I could either pay when we got to the dock or they could send a link now. I asked for the link and never got it. I did get an email confirming our booking, though. The other oddity was that the website showed the cruise going to the town of Krems, but the booking only let you book to the slightly closer town of Dürnstein. I eventually assumed that their docking facility at Krems was not available. I researched how to take a bus from Dürnstein to Krems. We took a train from Vienna to Melk the morning of the cruise. This took about an hour (plus travel time to the station itself). If you go early, you can check out Melk (a cute town) or the abbey there (I'll review it separately). It seemed like trains ran at least hourly. The cruise dock is about a 20-minute walk from the Melk train station. When we got to the cruise's ticket office, I wasn't sure if they'd still have our reservation, think we already paid, etc. It turned out they had the booking and did want us to pay, which was fine. We then waited for the boat. It showed up about 5 minutes before boarding. Tour buses disgorged a lot of passengers just before that. We boarded and found a table on the top deck (uncovered). There are two lower enclosed decks also. My daughter jokingly referred to this as a booze cruise, which wasn't wrong. Most people were getting beer or wine, it seemed. Also, there was a lot of smoking (cigars and cigarettes) so we relocated to another table upwind of most of that. We skipped the booze but did get a slice of apricot cake, which we split. That was good. The scenery along this part of the Danube was great. Large hills / mountains rise up from the shore, small castles and old churches were frequent, and there were a lot of vineyards. I'm glad we made the effort to do this. Towards the end, I got the impression that Dürnstein may not be the endpoint, so I asked the bartender if the boat went to Krems. He confirmed that it did. So, we opted to just stay onboard after Dürnstein for another 15 minutes and got off (with almost everyone else) at Krems. From the Krems dock, it was about a 25-minute walk along a bike / walking path to the railway station. It again took about an hour to get back to Vienna from there. Trains seemed frequent. Other than the booking process, we enjoyed this. The scenery merited the extra 2-hour round trip on trains to get to and from the cruise. read more

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We used this company for a Danube River tour from Melk to Krems. It was expensive, €45,70 per person but it included train service from Vienna to Melk, admission to the Melk Abbey, the boat and train from Krems to Vienna. It was simply awesome and we had a terrific time. We passed by such amazing towns with too many fantastic monuments to name. It reminded me why I think Austria is one of the most beautiful countries. It was well worth the money and a lot of fun. read more

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