Finishing touches on Viking Glory's equipment fitting in Port of Turku
The eagerly awaited gorgeous m/s Viking Glory is now sailing her first voyages between Turku and Stockholm. For the last weeks before starting operations, Viking Glory was being equipped in the Port of Turku. Without passengers, the atmosphere onboard is always special, and the last moments are filled with action.
Intendant Tuuli Peltonen got her first feel of Viking Glory when she climbed on board the ship on a pilot ladder in Copenhagen. “The situation was unusual even for an experienced sailor.”
The building of Viking Glory at the XSI shipyard in China, during the coronavirus quarantine, meant that a major part of its finishing was left to be done in Turku. There was three weeks plus a few important days of time in the port of Turku to fit the equipment as well as perform extensive safety training with the crew.
For example, Viking Glory’s Tax-free shop was built in practice completely in the port of Turku. Piantek Oy started the work with bare walls. In the new concept, different product families from clothes to fragrances were arranged into various sets of themes inside the shop.
The management group convened every day during the equipment fitting to review the situation. During the last weeks, the interiors were finished, and the introduction of different systems was rehearsed. There were around three hundred representatives of subcontractors, Viking Line employees and crew members working on board the ship.
The concepts of the ship’s restaurants were also tested in practice. The crew got the chance to act as test audience. The cabins were fitted with everything including a toilet brush, soap and tapings.
”3,000 mattresses were brought to the cabins. The scale is indicated by the fact that the mattresses filled 14 truckloads”, Intendant Tuuli Peltonen says.
The passengers on board Glory will sleep on Finnish mattresses. The ship design and technology are also almost 100% Finnish work.