Shore Excursions - When do they start?

[Martin Pickering]

G'Day, I'm Martin from Melbourne, Australia.

We are cruising the Eastern Mediterranean on the MSC Armonia from 29/4/23 to 6/5/23.

We're trying to plan ahead by booking shore excursions well in advance.

As first time cruisers we've decided to initially stick with the MSC sponsored shore excursions.

We've noticed that the shore excursions don't seem to have any start times which makes it difficult to plan.

For example, we're arriving in Mykonos at 9AM on 2/5 and don't depart until 2AM on the 3/5.

We plan to book the MSC shore excursion to Delos which takes 3.5 hours but the shore excursion details don't specify what time it starts?

Not knowing when a shore excursion starts makes it difficult to book any other shore excursions and given we're at Mykonos for 17 hours we'd like to do more than just visit Delos.

We've tried going through the booking process without actually paying and still no sign of excursion start time(s).

Do we have to wait until much closer to the cruise date to find out when shore excursions actually start?

How do experienced cruisers plan their shore excursions when staying in port for the majority of a day?

Thanks,

Martin