Eliot Ness
New Member
I'm a little late to this thread, but yes, you have to do your homework before booking any excursion, either from the cruise line or an independent excursion. I'd say 80 to 90% of our excursions are independent and they almost always have smaller groups and a more intimate experience. I'm probably not supposed to say this, but I used to get a lot of useful excursion reviews from a rival cruise board with the initials C.C. We have never missed the ship, but we came close in Fiji a couple of years back. One of the couples insisted she lost her cruise credentials and we wasted over 30 minutes looking for them, only to discover they were in her bag! That 30-minute lag put us in heavy traffic with schools letting out and road construction. Thirty minutes late and they had our passports ready to give to the shore officials. But it was an excellent excursion, easily one of my favorites, and we'd do it again in a heartbeat but this time keeping a closer eye on my watch. We just got back from a three cruise, 45-day adventure in Spain, France and Italy where almost all of our excursions were booked independently with no 6:00am departures or disappointing outcomes. We don't book independently because of price, although they are usually cheaper, but because of the better experience with much smaller numbers of people.
