Coming back here to give our view after just coming back from a 6-day extended Connoisseur tour. In a nutshell, no, it’s not worth it. If you are 85 and can’t walk, or enjoy several days riding around on a bus/train with a brief stop in a couple 2-start resorts, then this tour is for you. For everyone else, you will be sorely disappointed.
I won’t talk about the cruise itself since that’s not what is being asked. The tour is 90% sitting on a bus or train…days on end. The pace is painful. For example, today we drove from Copper River back to Anchorage to end our tour. It is normally a 3.5 hour drive, but we made it into a 7-hour all-day drive. I think the pacing is both to delay the arrival at the next destination to give time for the previous load to get out of the way, and the multiple stops attempt to give some justification for having a tour guide so they can talk about things and show videos.
If you tour Alaska on your own, by all means you do not want to go to these Princess destinations, with perhaps the exception of Denali. These are old 2-start resorts - owned by Princess, staffed with untrained and unsupervised international workers. Lookup the cost of the resorts for staying on your own. We happened to be the unfortunate group this year that was impacted by a wildfire right next to the Denali resort resulting in lost power and water for the 2-days we were there. The park was also closed. We learned that the resort provides water to the whole area around the resort (their pumping station). The fact that the resort does not have the contingency plans to at least keep the water pump in service with the loss of power is nothing less than negligence. The resort manager should be fired on the spot. But it wouldn’t surprise me if that person isn’t a seasonal foreign worker with no experience.
The tour guide was nice, but could easily be replaced by a recording on the bus. The tour guide has no autonomy and must answer to the Princess headquarters. That person is also a seasonal worker, and literally has no purpose other than to be an excuse to extract more money out of the traveler. This contrasted with an Insight tour, where the tour guide has full autonomy to make spot decisions for the benefit of the trip. In this Denali example, the tour guide could do nothing. They had no autonomy to make offsite arrangements for anything.
No only would I never do another Princess cruise (did you know they are run by Carnival?), but by no chance would I ever do a land tour with them. I did not get to view and experience Alaska on this trip…it is like I never went at all. If you can walk, drive, and do things on your own, definitely do not waste your money on this trip. This is not Alaska…