Booking Alaska Port Tours Over a Year Early?

[K.T.B.]

I'm a huge proponent of booking excursions as early as possible.  if there's an excursion you want to do, book it ASAP. When I did my last Alaskan cruise I had everything booked as soon as I could.  Most of what i booked I knew sold out quickly, so I made sure to be ready when I knew it was available.  The biggest/best one was the helicopter ride out to Mendenhall Glacier.  Quite easily the best excursion I've ever taken.  Period.  I found out later it had sold out completely within days of being offered.

 

So book 'em when you can.  You can always cancel and get your money back prior to the cruise if you find something else you want to do.

[KYBOB]

On 4/16/2021 at 11:39 PM, Cali Viajera said:

I have been unable to access my account 🤣 so will call them first thing in the morning. Hopefully, we will be able to book tours outside the cruise line by the time we go next year! Glad we will be onboard with you KYBOB😊 We begin a week earlier with a cruise tour starting in Fairbanks.

We too are on a cruise tour! Ours starts on the June 16 with the gold dredge tour in Fairbanks. We are going to fly in a day earlier June 14th to give us the 15th to get acclimated some because our flight does not get in to Fairbanks until for our time zone well after mid-night / 10:00pm local time.  

[Cali Viajera]

On 4/16/2021 at 4:31 PM, KYBOB said:

We are booked on the same cruise (June 25th Majestic) and received an email on Wednesday. In looking at some of the offerings some only have 9 seats left, etc. Did notice that the largest group is 20 people unless COVID (had it) has wiped my memory I think before time (before COVID) the numbers we larger on the popular tours (lumber jack show, large whale watch cruises not the small boats, train rides)??? Or is that a tactic to get us to go oh no only 20 tickets we need to book now!!! or there really is only going to be 20 tickets because they are going to limit the number of people to allow social distancing? Heard Disney is already back to 100% on the rides, I know not the same thing just saying.

KYBOB-We are doing the 'Off the beaten path' OB7 cruise tour, flying into Fairbanks on the 17th. We had to cancel our July '20 cruise, so looking forward to this one!

[Roger88]

Booking excursions these days is kinda scar cause you never know if you will make it and whether those excursions get cancelled or not.. Usually its veeery hard to get a refund in case of a cancelled excursion

[KYBOB]

1 hour ago, Cali Viajera said:

KYBOB-We are doing the 'Off the beaten path' OB7 cruise tour, flying into Fairbanks on the 17th. We had to cancel our July '20 cruise, so looking forward to this one!

Ours is the 17 Day Connoisseur Escorted UB1 so we will have to get together and compare tours when on the ship. We have also reserved some of the more popular port tours some were down to 4 and 6 people, we left the ones with 20 seats until later and I will check back on those. We were to have gone on this one this this year and they moved us to next year. This was our 4th canceled cruise since 2019 so hopefully 2022 will be the year we get to go. 

 

As to the previous post we have not had any issues with getting our money back on the canceled port tours, at least the ones we had to canceled last year. Princess canceled the cruise we then had to log in and cancel the port tours online. Received the refund that same day back to the card.  

[Thrak]

We're booked on Sapphire for Alaska in May of 2022. We also got email about booking Princess excursions in advance. I looked at the offerings and found that, with a number of them, when I actually clicked to get more information I got a "page not found" type of error. I wasn't planning to book the excursions anyway but was interested to see where they went and what they did to see if I might eventually be interested in booking. It's kind of a slap in the face to have them push early booking and then not actually have the information available. As usual, the marketing people have no connection to the reality of the IT people. Marketing people are "special" that way.

[cr8tiv1]

5 hours ago, Roger88 said:

Booking excursions these days is kinda scar cause you never know if you will make it and whether those excursions get cancelled or not.. Usually its veeery hard to get a refund in case of a cancelled excursion

 

I am not sure I read your post correctly.  I found it very easy to cancel an excursion.  I don't remember if I did it online or called Princess.  But the funds were returned to my credit card within 10 days.  I cancelled my excursion a month before Princess cancelled my cruise (gut feeling).  I did not want to have the two conflict.  

[Cali Viajera]

I checked out the excursions. For our cancelled cruise I had booked with private companies. I plan to do so again, can’t imagine that things will be so restrictive bubble wise in14 months.