Viking Rhine River Cruises Basel to Amsterdam

You should probably be looking at Cruise Critic. It has threads in its forum that provide frequent updates on water levels. As for communication from Viking, that would not occur until shortly before your trip. e.g., https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/3096138-rhine-water-levels-2026-plus-info-and-tips/page/21/

This is a link to the last page of a thread on Cruise Critic specifically discussing Rhine water levels in 2026. The thread started in January and at the moment is 23 pages long. The most active participant is highly knowledgeable and posts a ton of detail about water levels etc. The summary AT THE MOMENT seems to be: yes, trips are currently impacted, with ship swaps, longer bus rides, hotel stays in some cases. But there's no telling what the situation will be in September. I would NOT expect Viking to be very forthcoming about trip deviations and disruptions. Some companies are better about it, but it seems that they are not (no personal experience yet -- supposed to go on that cruise next May).

So hop on that Cruise Critic board and read it like you're going to do a dissertation on it, and keep monitoring what's happening.

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/3096138-rhine-water-levels-2026-plus-info-and-tips/page/23/

see several posts by Carol Now Retired on her recent experience:

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/lessons-learned-when-things-go-wrong

3 part trip report

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/rhine-river-cruise-part-1-pretour-and-basel-colmar-strasbourg

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/rhine-river-cruise-part-2-heidelberg-boppard-and-on-the-ship

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/rhine-river-cruise-part-3-koblenz-cologne-and-amsterdam

The current predictions look forward as far as the first week in September. In that week, it looks like the river might be around 75 cm at the Kaub measuring station, located just downstream from Bacharach. Orange block in the chart linked to below shows the predicted range, so maybe a little less or a little more. Historically, the measurement has been 2+ times higher for that week:

https://vorhersage.bafg.de/6-Wochen-Vorhersage/Rhein-Kaub_6Wochen_Wasserstand.pdf

From this point on, river is expected to rise, but only incrementally. 75 cm is somewhere around 40% of the historical average.

Smaller ships which do day cruises should be able to manage. Freighters and bigger passenger ships may or may not depending on the judgment of the individual captains / cruise providers.

You may want to check this website after a few more weeks to see how it's going.

I hope it works out for you. We took that trip in July 2016 and my fear was that it would turn into a very expensive bus trip.

Have you signed up for any extra excursions? If not, I suggest you save your money. We signed up for the wine tasting excursion when in the Moselle region. It's advertised as four wine tastings. Since we've done lots of wine tastings in the past, I took that to mean we'd visit four wineries.

Well, we didn't visit any wineries. We were taken to a wine shop in the middle of a village. In the wine cellar we got to taste four different mediocre wines. It took about 30% of the total stop, with the rest spent in their retail area where they tried to sell us that mediocre wine for about three times what it should have cost.

We took this same cruise in Christmas Season. The water was low in Basel; so we got on near Freiburg. We were bused once in the Middle Rhein from one ship to another (identical). The bus portion was lousy but overall we had a good time. We had done the
Danube on another trip. It was better as you stop nearer the sights, allowing more chance to visit sights without the hassle of buses.

Looking at recent Facebook posts, some companies are cancelling, some are doing boat switches, others bus/hotel.

All the Vikinig cruises were on buses today in Rüdesheim. There were 3, maybe 4 bus loads.
I would wait. Otherwise, you may spend your whole cruise on a bus.

Are you already booked? Do you know what your options are? I saw long range weather forecasts and they are not expecting rainfall to significantly improve. All the snowmelt that would be feeding the Rhine earlier in the year is long gone. If there is any way you can delay or back out, I'd be working on it.