Endeavor or Islander to Galapagos?

[MJC]

Can anyone share with me what factors you considered when choosing between these two ships for your Galapagos cruise? Thank you.

 

Margaret

[miamimom]

Hi - we just returned from a fantastic week aboard the Islander. Frankly, we chose this ship because of the availability of the special discounts for kids (one free, one half price - quite compelling) on this one and not the other. I guess because the ships are small, they book up fast and we only made our plans a couple of months before the trip. I initially thought I'd prefer the bigger ship because it has a stabilizer and I thought I'd be less likely to get seasick. But, I took Bonine as a preventative every day and had no problems whatsoever. Having only 48 passengers on board does make for a more intimate experience, you get to know the others quickly. And moving people on and off the ship for the excursions went very smoothly. One of the naturalists told me he thought the smaller ship/group was by far the best.

[MJC]

Thank you, your reply was very helpful. We booked the Islander mostly because of scheduling but I was concerned about the ship being so small. We don't get sick but I thought it might be too intimate. But, the main interest is the shore excursions and the quicker we get ashore the more we will see, so I'm very happy with our choice, and I'm glad to hear you had a great experience on it.

 

Margaret

[zzzany]

We just returned from Galapagos on the bigger shp the Endeavour. We had the same questions when booking. We use our long time agent Linda at Sunstone Tours, she only does small ships so is a big help to us. She has been on all the ships.

 

As her suggest we wanted the Endeavor since it has a glass bottom boat along with it as we did not want to snorkle every day. There is lots to see under water. 100 passengers didn't matter since you can only have 16 in one place on an island, so we all went off in different directions and felt like we were on a very small ship.

 

Islander is more expensive, Linda says the cabins are nicer and the ship is lovely.

 

We have been to Alaska and Columbia Snake River on small ships with Cruise West. We found this sailing on Lindblad to be excellent