Cruising excursions

[Alicomp]

Has anyone used cruisingexcursions.com for shore excursions? Were you satisfied?

 

Thank you.

[CruiserBruce]

If you do a search, you will find many threads on them. The summary: great prices. Not so great customer service. And some reports of total screw ups.

 

And, you would find they are a tour clearing house, or broker. They don't actually do the excursions. They contract with locals.

[Alicomp]

If you do a search, you will find many threads on them. The summary: great prices. Not so great customer service. And some reports of total screw ups.

 

And, you would find they are a tour clearing house, or broker. They don't actually do the excursions. They contract with locals.

 

Thank you. I did a search and did see some troubling comments.

[John Bull]

They're an excursion booking agency, much like Viator and City Discovery but they're the new kid on the block - been around just a year or two.

So the quality & reliability of the tours will depend on the operators, not cruisingexcursions.

You need to narrow down your reviews to the actual operator & tour (can usually be figured out using google & some sleuthing)

Several big, established & reputable UK travel agencies offer their services, so they're certainly not fly-by-night scamsters.

Prices usually way lower than ships' tours, but a little more than a direct booking.

Bear in mind they're an extra cog in the chain (badly thought-out engineering metaphor :D), so an extra opportunity for mistakes & confusion.

 

JB :)

[LondonTowner]

There are lots of negative comments about them on Tripadvisor. Personally, we very rarely use ship excursions. With a bit of research and effort it is easy to make your own arrangements.

[GreyingJay]

I just came off the Norwegian Spirit May 6 sailing from Venice to Barcelona. My family (and about 50 other people from the ship) bought excursion tour packages through Cruising Excursions. I am happy to report that the excursions were great and we had a great time.

 

We had excursions into the following ports:

 

Athens (Piraeus), Greece

Kusadaci (Ephesus), Turkey

Istanbul, Turkey

Mykonos, Greece

Naples, Italy

Civitaveccia (Rome), Italy

Livorno, Italy

Toulon, France

 

At each port the tour guide was easy to find, was friendly and knowledgeable. We were always brought back to the ship with plenty of time to spare. The tours were priced attractively and much cheaper than the equivalent tours offered by the ship (they probably contract it out to exactly the same people).

 

My only criticism was for the tour in Rome, where the start of our tour was delayed by the lack of port-operated shuttle buses between the ship and the bus terminal. As a result we were only given 10 minutes to find lunch.

 

The two tours in Turkey concluded with hokey stops at either a leather shop or ceramics shop, but there was no high-pressure sales pitch. The tour guide in Istanbul did a better job of at least explaining why ceramics were a part of Turkish culture, so we at least got some educational value.

 

Tours of all these beautiful European ports always feel a little rushed, and that may have been made worse by the fact that our tours had to return to the ship so early. The NCL-sponsored tour buses rolled in right at the "all-aboard" time (or even 30-45 minutes late), and the ship waited for them. That means those people got an extra 1-3 hours of touring time that we did not. However, they paid a lot more!

 

I would use Cruising Excursions again in the future.

Edited May 23, 2014 by GreyingJay

[Green4]

I used Cruise Excursions on 18th May 2014 for a tour of Skara Brae, Skaill House and Ring of Brodgar on the Ruby Princess British Isles itinerary. They rang me 2 days before on my mobile to advise me of a change of time. On the day, we had an excellent guide, the tour covered more than an equivalent Princess Cruises and was two-thirds of the price. They also got us back to the ship with plenty of time to spare.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

[TheChap]

On our Celebrity British Isles cruise (Aug, 2014), we booked a “small group excursion” while in Kirkwall (Orkney Islands) with CRUISING EXCURSIONS.COM. From their ad, it was implied that we would be taking a guided tour through Skara Brae, as well as to a few other historic sites. What the company really provided, was merely a taxi service. The driver did not talk to us about the various historical sites while driving us to locations. The driver told us that this was just a taxi service that Cruising Excursions employs, and that he has received several complaints from other passengers. At the Skara Brae site, we had to pay for entry, which again from the website we inferred was included. We contacted the company via e-mail upon returning home. They continued to say that they’d reimburse us for the entry fee. We gave them our credit card number several times. We even had Visa contact them. About 3 weeks ago (mid-November), a Cruising Excursions representative contacted us directly and said the money would be credited to our Visa account the next day. It never happened. if you book with this company, please be aware that it might merely be a taxi service from one location to another, rather than a guided tour.