One of the biggest costs you'll face when you're on a cruise is excursions.
I'm Gary Bembridge of Tips For Travellers and I'm going to tell you in this video
how you can actually go on fantastic excursions and not spend as much money.
Well the first thing I recommend you do is research, research, research. Make
sure that you understand what is available in every port. It's very
easy to do that. You can obviously look at the Cruise Line excursions, because
they will have little booklets or you can look online and understand the sort
of things that you can do and the range of things that you can do. Secondly, of
course, look at blogs or other online cruise sites - things like Cruise
Critic and there's obviously blogs, even like my own Tips For Travellers, which will
cover many many ports. You can basically search online and look for
port guides. Of course you can watch many videos as many great video tours of
destinations and excursions and ports. So basically find out what is available
and the range of things to do. The second thing that I recommend you do is
understand how busy the port is likely to be. If you find that you're going
to a port where there's five or six ships there could be 15,000 to 20,000 people
there, and so that may influence what you actually want to do because there will
be a lot of people going on all the popular trips. So how do you know how
many ships are going to be in any one place at any one time? The good news is
there's a website that tells you just that, and the website is called CruiseTimetables
and and the great thing about that website is you basically put
in the port, you put in the day you're going to be there, and it will tell you what
ships are there and how many people those ships are likely to have on board.
It gives you a great sense of how busy a port is going to be and will help
you decide what you want to do that particular day. The third thing, of
course, is then to go through that list of cruise line excursions and decide
which of those that you really want to do - and no matter what - those are the ones
you want to do. Doing that process you'll decide the things that you really want
to do, so my fourth tip is then to look at alternatives. There are many
alternatives to the cruise line excursions. There are companies that
specifically develop tours and excursions similar to those that are
offered by the cruise lines and often many more alternatives to the ones
offered by the cruise lines. Some of those sites are ShoreFox.com,
ShoreTrips.com, CruisingExcursions.com and ShoreExcursionsGroup.com
So there's a number of sites that basically will put together for
every itinerary and every port alternatives to Cruise Line excursions
and the great thing about looking at those sites is you'll find other
people have posted photographs, sometimes videos and reviews of the different
excursions. What's great about those sites is you basically put in
the name of your ship and your dates it will bring up your itinerary, every single
port and then you can go through port by port and it will tell you what
excursions are available for your specific ship, on that specific day, in
that specific port. You will find as many of the excursions are similar and tend
to have slightly smaller groups, and are usually much cheaper. My next tip is
to look at private guides. There's a whole range from
relatively inexpensive ones through to very expensive ones. One great
alternative, which tends to be relatively inexpensive, are local tour guides and you
can find those through a site called toursbylocals.com . You could go in
there and take a look at the port you're calling on and you will often find a
relatively inexpensive local guide. Or you can look on things like Cruise
Critic where you'll find especially in the roll call for your particular cruise,
people will be looking for people who want to combine together and you can find a
guide for three of you. four of you maybe up to six of you - you can share one guide.
One of the great alternatives, and probably the least expensive of all of
your options, is to use a hop-on hop-off bus. These are a great alternative. Hop
on Hop-off buses are in pretty much every port that you will call on. These buses
will take you to all of the main sites in the particular port. They
will be relatively inexpensive and what also happens, which is great, is hop-on
hop-off of buses will either have a stop at the place where your ship docks or the
cruise port, or if ships are in on that day they add an extra stop because they
see this is a big business opportunity. Hop-on hop-off of buses are
great. They're inexpensive, you'll have commentary in multiple languages, it will
take you to all of the places that you want to go to, all the critical places,
and obviously hopping off you can spend as much or
as little time. It gives you an overview through the commentary of the history.
You know the significant things that you're going to be seeing and it's a
great great alternative. That is probably the best and most
cost-effective way of sight seeing. Of course you can go out self touring yourself but the great
thing about hop-on hop-off bus is it combines self touring but with all that
great commentary, information and you don't have to worry as someone has curated
it - and the great thing is because it will come back to the cruise port you
can just check the times and make sure that you're back in plenty of time for
the ship. Cruise excursions can cost a lot of money. It can be many hundreds of
dollars added on to your vacation cost. So hopefully that's given you some
alternative ways and given you more confidence to look at options and
alternatives to Cruise Line excursions. If you liked the video I'd love it if you
gave it a "like", but even more importantly please subscribe to Tips For Travellers and
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