Cruise Tours - Crown Princess

[mediator]

I have been on many cruises, but have not done a cruisetour. My husband and I were looking at doing the Canada/New England tour/cruise 17 days on October 9th on the Crown Princess. My question is, are cruisetours a good value, or could we do better on our own? The hotels seems very nice, and we don't necessarily care that much about 3 meals a day. Since we have always been cruises, we are not experienced with putting land portions together. This seems like an easy way for us to go in that we don't have any worries. Any experience with Princess cruisetours, pro and con we sure would appreciate it if you share with us. Thank you.

[katisdale]

I think it will always be cheaper to do it yourself. That said, we will be taking our second Princess tour this spring. Our first was to Alaska and we were very pleased with our week on land in Alaska, especially in not having to handle the baggage at all. We also liked that we could sit back relax and watch the scenery without trading off the driving as it seems the driver always misses something. It was also nice to have the commentary which if we had been doing it ourselves we would have missed. This spring we are doing the Imperial Treasures tour before a Baltic cruise. I can't report on that yet but if it is even half as easy as the one to Alaska we will be pleased.

[easy spirit]

We are doing the same cruise-tour as you & had the same concern. I did an extensive research with few tour companies (Insight, Cosmos & even Tauck) that does similar land tours. Probably there are tons more, but for me 3 were enough. My findings price-wise for the land portion only were as following:

Insight -7 days - very similar in price

Cosmos- 8 days - much lower

Tauck- 10 days- much higher because they have more days

IMO, there was a lot of logistics involved as the cruise departs from Quebec & none of the tours ended there. Probably it's cheaper doing it on our own but ultimately decided to give Princess a try on the cruise-tour.