Seabourn Excursion Review

[whystayhome]

On another thread, someone suggested starting a Seabourn excursion review sub-forum and wondered how to do this. I think it's a great idea. Normally, we are DIY type travelers, but this past cruise, we were a little leery of wandering around by ourselves in a number of the ports we visited or hiring private guides because of the distance of the attractions from the ship plus the number of sea days between ports in case of a problem with getting back to the ship. Also, we had a lot of on-board credit to burn.

 

Some of the excursions were terrific (e.g., Petra and the Etruscan tombs out of Civitavecchia), some were good (e.g., Wadi Rum) and some were fair (e.g., Salalah and Muscat). Some were, why did I get off the ship? The quality of the excursions is of course a function of what a port offers combined with the competence of the guide. Sometimes you just pick the wrong option in the port. Sometimes an excursion turns out much better than it looks.

 

For future Seabourn cruises, I would love to have input from people who have taken a particular Seabourn-sponsored excursion in the port to help with trip planning. Is this of interest to others? Linda

[Les Picantins]

I would like to see Seabourn initiate this system. There are not enough of us here on Cruise Critic to do this ourselves. What I suggest is as simple as what we see on different on-line shopping websites. The different articles presented often have 1 to 5 star ratings with comments from previous customers who have purchased the same article in the past.

 

I think this would be very useful for both passengers and destination services sales.

 

Any other thoughts out there?

[galeforce9]

I'd like a rating system somewhere. I'm very dubious about booking seabourn tours after some expensive disasters. Like the op says though, there are some instances when a tour seems to be the best option but it is often a leap of faith. Seabourn could get more business from me if there were open feedback from customers available. At least they could tune their excursions to provide the range of what people want. Presently seabourn are asking $150 for an on your own excursion. Whilst I prefer to be unguided once I get somewhere, this price for a maximum of three hours travel seems ridiculous. (Carcassonne from Sete if you're interested).

[MightyQuinn]

On another thread, someone suggested starting a Seabourn excursion review sub-forum and wondered how to do this. I think it's a great idea….

 

For future Seabourn cruises, I would love to have input from people who have taken a particular Seabourn-sponsored excursion in the port to help with trip planning. Is this of interest to others?

For many ports, Seabourn shore excursions have similar, if not identical, descriptions as HAL. Given their common parentage, I suspect they use the same providers running the same tours, with the only difference being passenger capacity on each tour, likely lower on Seabourn. HAL does have a rating system for shorex, easily searchable by port and type of excursion. I used it recently for some shorex we were considering for Seabourn and found it very helpful.

 

http://reviews.hollandamerica.com/9041/E/europe-reviews/category.htm

[Les Picantins]

For many ports, Seabourn shore excursions have similar, if not identical, descriptions as HAL. Given their common parentage, I suspect they use the same providers running the same tours, with the only difference being passenger capacity on each tour, likely lower on Seabourn. HAL does have a rating system for shorex, easily searchable by port and type of excursion. I used it recently for some shorex we were considering for Seabourn and found it very helpful.

 

http://reviews.hollandamerica.com/9041/E/europe-reviews/category.htm

 

This is exactly what I've been suggesting for Seabourn. I'm sure I would double my excursion participation if I had this kind of information.

[MightyQuinn]

This is exactly what I've been suggesting for Seabourn. I'm sure I would double my excursion participation if I had this kind of information.

I agree! But I doubt there are enough cruisers who take shore excursions and are willing to rate their experience to warrant the creation of an SB ratings system. The HAL system is quite comprehensive and has reviews for many of the same shorex as offered by SB. I think it's a pretty good proxy in the absence of a SB system. It was very helpful to me on several excursions we were considering on SB and I plan to use it again in the future.

[ShannonSC2]

I would like to see something also. We are going on our first Seabourn cruise in a couple of weeks and I am not sure what are good excursions and what I should avoid.

[nolatravelgirl]

For many ports, Seabourn shore excursions have similar, if not identical, descriptions as HAL. Given their common parentage, I suspect they use the same providers running the same tours, with the only difference being passenger capacity on each tour, likely lower on Seabourn. HAL does have a rating system for shorex, easily searchable by port and type of excursion. I used it recently for some shorex we were considering for Seabourn and found it very helpful.

 

http://reviews.hollandamerica.com/9041/E/europe-reviews/category.htm

You don't even need to limit yourself to just HAL reviews. The shore excursions, most of the time, (I am sure there are exceptions) are run by local tour operators. If you just do a google search with the name of the tour you can 99% of the time find the tour on some website. Another good place to search is tripadvisor.

[kathy16]

I think this is a great idea. When we went on our 14 day Med cruise RT Barcelona last year, we took mostly SB excursions- many of them were worthwhile, and all were expensive.

I did not rate them then, but I could have. Perhaps, if we take another SB cruise (depending on their smoking- or should I say hopefully soon to be non-smoking policy!!!),

I will definitely take notes.

Kathy