Your did the research, got with a good travel agent and have your fabulous cruise vacation booked. What’s next? Waiting is a big part of it, but hopefully that booking part took place well in advance of sailing so there is some time to investigate other aspects of The Process. Frankly, all you have to do is make final payment on your cruise, pack and go but looking at some other parts of your cruise vacation now, well in advance of your cruise sailing, can really pay off when actually on the ship.
Its all part of being prepared, something an unbelievably huge number of cruise travelers don’t do. Those are the people you will see on the ship that are in a bad mood, complain a lot and leave us thinking “Why did they even come on this ship? Everything that is bothering them was totally avoidable” So let’s dive in.
Hopefully you briefly investigated what you might do off the ship before booking it. The available tours ashore should have appealed to you or you would not have booked that particular sailing. Maybe. Your itinerary may take you to familiar destinations where you already know exactly what you are going to do. If not, now is the time to get more serious about shore excursions.
If your sailing is more than 120 days from now, we’ll call that “semi-serious” because the cruise line may not allow booking tours at this point. If they do or don’t, make a list of each port of call and what you plan on doing there, even if that is “stay on the ship” which has its merits too. In any case, visit the cruise line website and become familiar with navigating the shore excursion area. For illustration purposes, let’s use Carnival Cruise Line‘s site by going to Carnival.com then clicking on “Explore Carnival Cruising” which will drop down a menu where we can select Shore Excursions.
From there, a variety of information pops up to see right away without going anyplace else, including this video from Carnival Cruise Lines:
We have the time so use it, watch the Carnival Cruise video, read what that page has to offer in the way of general information that applies to all shore excursions. Each cruise line is a bit different but all feature shore excursions front and center as an important part of the cruise experience.
Now we need to match up our itinerary with available excursions so first start with printing that itinerary or saving it to an online document, something you can easily access at any time. Internet-savvy people can create a Google Document to store that information in and access it from any computer. For our purposes, I have just created a sample itinerary for a nice Caribbean Carnival cruise sailing from Miami.
| Sun | Miami, FL | 4:00 PM | |
| Mon | Nassau, The Bahamas | 7:00 AM | 2:00 PM |
| Tue | Fun Day At Sea | ||
| Wed | St. Thomas, Usvi | 11:00 AM | 6:00 PM |
| Thu | San Juan, Puerto Rico | 7:00 AM | 3:30 PM |
| Fri | Grand Turk | 11:00 AM | 5:30 PM |
| Sat | Fun Day At Sea | ||
| Sun | Miami, FL | 8:00 AM |
Here we have four ports to consider so back to the shore excursion page of the Carnival Cruise Lines website we go to pick all the shore excursions we might possibly be interested in. We’ll make a list of what interests us and might interest any guests we have sailing with us then talk about it, get the others involved with the process, and have fun doing it.
Some travelers make a big deal out of this too, hosting parties for others they are sailing with right after booking, spread out over several months, with a theme for each one. Others who are going through the mechanics of this pick only excursions they know they will like and the others just need to fall in line. Sort of like a bonus for their time spent on the research.
In the Caribbean, its a safe bet to also list “Walk off the ship and find a beach” as a self-guided activity that many do quite successfully. But here is a sample of what that preliminary list might look for, the list that has every excursion we might possibly want to do. Don’t worry about pricing right now, we’ll get to that later. This is just what might work, so considering who is going and what shore excursion they might like.
Nassau shore excursions
- Walk off the ship and find a beach
- See Nassau the Fun Way on a Segway!
- Atlantis Dolphin Cay Deep Water Swim
- Historical Highlights Tour
St Thomas shore excursions
- Walk off the ship and find a beach
- Jeep and Beach Adventure
- St. John Trunk Bay Beach & Snorkel Trails
- Castaway Barefoot Sail & Snorkel to Shipwreck Cove
San Juan shore excursions
- Walk off the ship and find a beach
- Hidden Paradise Zipline Adventure
- History Behind the Walls – Walking Tour
- San Juan City/Juan Carlos & His Flamenco Rumba
Grand Turk shore excursions
- Walk off the ship and find a beach
- Reef & Rays
- Catamaran Sailaway, Beach & Snorkel
- Deep Sea Fishing Expedition
Shore excursions, on a Carnival Cruise or any line are “rated” for activity level and current pricing is offered too. The activity level is a good part to pay attention to at this point if grandma does not really get into rock climbing all that much. Skip that shore excursion for now. The price, as mentioned earlier, is something to try to avoid thinking about right now, many months in advance. You might run across something in the way of a shore excursion that you have always wanted to do like swimming with dolphins and give that priority in planning.
Remember from Other Expenses To Seriously Consider, it is quite possible to spend as much or more than the price of the cruise (which you know now since you have booked it) on other expenses along the way (which you don’t know yet but this is the start of defining those expenses).
But that is one of the best parts of a cruise vacation, being able to customize the experience for you and your traveling companions. Yes, them too. When everyone is involved in the decisions, all along the way, everyone can really get into the experience once on board and you have just eliminated one of the common reasons that you will see those grumpy people on the fabulous cruise ship who are frittering away precious time away from it all by arguing: Unexpected expenses and the whole “wow, this is costing more than I thought it would” thing. There should be no surprises once on board with good planning, what we are doing right here, right now.
At the end of the process, we don’t want to schedule every minute of every day for everyone you are traveling with. Indeed, since we are talking about shore excursions, not everyone has to go on the same one or go at all for that matter. Its that same flexibility quality of a cruise vacation now coming down to street level in terms you can use to set up everyone to have a good time, regardless of their interests.
What we do off the ship, regardless of what that is, can define the experience, much like something as simple as when we eat dinner and how we go about that, up next as we work through the process of going on a fabulous cruise vacation.
Flickr photo by afagen
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