Persistent drought has pushed water levels on the Danube and Rhine to their lowest in decades, forcing Viking, Avalon Waterways, AmaWaterways and Uniworld to swap ships, add bus transfers and, in some cases, cancel sailings this northern summer.
The Danube in Romania fell to its lowest level since 1996 in recent weeks, Reuters reported, while Hungary’s Paks Nuclear Power Plant said on 27 July that the river’s level at Paks had dropped to minus 42 inches, breaking all previous records. Further west, the Rhine near Frankfurt has fallen to just 53 centimetres.
Satellite images released by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus programme — comparing the Danube at Vidin in Bulgaria and the Rhine at Koblenz in Germany in August 2023 against August 2026 — show how sharply both rivers have receded. The disruption extends well beyond passenger cruising: commercial barge operators have had to cut cargo loads by as much as 80 per cent to avoid running aground, adding cost and delay to supply chains along both rivers.
Ship swaps, cancellations and a grounding
Viking has had two ships run aground this season: the Viking Einar, on the Rhine near Cologne in late June, and the Viking Ullur, on the Danube near Vidin in Bulgaria on 28 July, when Bulgarian border police evacuated around 185 passengers and 50 crew to shore; no injuries were reported. Viking’s advisory page for current sailings describes “exceptionally low water levels” on sections of both rivers and says select itineraries may still be modified, with affected guests and their travel advisors notified individually ahead of departure.
Avalon Waterways has cancelled a small number of departures, including its “Danube Dreams” and “Danube from Romania to Germany” itineraries aboard the Avalon Impression. The line is offering affected guests the option to switch to a Globus or Cosmos land tour instead, with the decision deadline extended to 1 December 2026, saying only that “the nature of rivers is to ebb and flow.”
AmaWaterways says it has not cancelled a single European sailing this summer, relying instead on ship swaps and motorcoach transfers to work around the worst-affected stretches — among them the Upper Danube between Regensburg and Passau, and the Rhine between Koblenz and Rüdesheim. Its current travel-updates page cites “unusually low water levels” across sections of the Rhine and Danube.
Uniworld is swapping ships for its 16 August “Castles Along the Rhine” departure, with passengers embarking in Amsterdam now boarding the S.S. Elisabeth and those embarking in Basel boarding the S.S. Antoinette. Its newest ship, the S.S. Emilie, was unable to dock at Spitz on a recent Danube sailing and skipped the cruise’s planned final stops of Regensburg and Nuremberg, visiting Linz instead. The line says it “continuously monitors river conditions” and adjusts itineraries where necessary.
Industry estimates suggest low-water disruption remains a minority event in any given year — AmaWaterways puts the figure at around 3.5 per cent of its European departures — but this year’s extended heatwaves have made 2026 one of the more disrupted river cruise seasons on record, with little meaningful rain forecast across the Rhine-Main-Danube system through the rest of August.
