Shore Excursions

We are getting between 25 and 50 visits to our blog each day. This must mean that some people in additional to friends and family are reading it. I assume some of these are future or current cruisers, so I’m going to share thoughts about booking shore excursion.

The cruise line offers several choices of shore excursion at most ports. This is a nice service, but it is a profit center for the cruise line, so they are taking a mark-up for setting these up.

The alternative is to book a private tour. Typically you can do this at a lower cost that the same tour provided through the cruise line.

We’ve had 8 ports so far where we have done organized excursions. Four of these were booked though Princess, and 4 were done privately.

In Cairns, we booked the tour to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) through Princess. The price was $229 per person. After the tour, we later met a person on the ship who had walked 10 minutes into town to the visitor’s center, and taken a similar tour for less than $100. It sounded like it was essentially the same as ours, except on a different “pod” center on the reef.

There was another group who had attempted to book a GBR trip through a supplier whose main business was scuba tours. The timing did not work out, because the dive schedules did not allow enough time to get back to the boat. Their solution was to book a helicopter ride back from the “pod” to the ship. The total cost of this approach was about the same as the ship’s cost, but they would get the helicopter ride of about 30 minutes. (A 5 minute helicopter ride on the ship’s tour was a $135 add-on.) However, because the weather situation was uncertain, this group was unable to take their tour. They spent the day in town, disappointed that they had missed the reef.

For the multi-day trip to Machu Picchu in Peru, some people booked a private version at a lower price than the ship’s. However, because of the mountains at Machu Picchu, the airplanes cannot fly unless there is a visual landing condition. The flights were delayed due to weather, but just made it back in time. If there had been an extra delay of a few hours, everyone would have missed the ship’s departure. Those who had the cruise through Princess would have been gotten back to the ship at Princess’ expense. Those on the private tour would be responsible to arrange their own return to the ship. Since the next port was Easter Island, this return would be expensive and difficult.

Our bottom line is that the cruise excursion offer the advantage that everything is arranged, you do not have to plan or to watch the schedule during the tour, you are assured of getting back to the ship some way, and you know you will not miss a tour. If you are willing to plan your own tour (either researched in advance or done that day at the visitor’s center or with a vendor that you find), then you can save 40% to 50% of the cost. You also get the advantage on the private tour of fine tuning the plan to fit added items that you want to see and to limit time at the places that are less interesting to you.