MSC excursions

[mapgirl34]

Hi everyone, 
We're caught between a rock and a hard place.  We're cruising to Norway including Svalbard, and offship excursions are slim, since it's a small port and two ships are there that day.  After speaking with many tour companies, I learned that the ships buy up the excursions forcing passengers to do MSC excursions.

My choice is (same price) offshore adventure that meets 2 hours after docking, but cancellation fee starts at 5% (standard for the location) and goes up to 100% cancellation fee within 2 weeks, or book with MSC, which requires 80 people to participate in order to operate.

We like both excursion options, but we don't typically do ship options simply because of the crowds.  The offline one is a risk of losing the money if for any reason our ship doesn't make it to port, or if we're late and can't make the tour, but there would only be 12 people on that excursion (the main pro).

Vs the MSC option which I would assume would get 80 takers (their ships carry 4000+ passengers), but I won't know until we're there.  If they cancel, I assume we get our money back (we'll probably be fighting for a refund as we always do with MSC), but more importantly, what if it cancels and we end up getting to do nothing or get moved to a less desirable tour?

I guess my questions are, has anyone had experience with getting a refund from an MSC canceled excursion?  Does it become OBC?  
Have anyone experienced a Norway cruise where the Svalbard landing was canceled/late due to weather?

Thanks in advance.

[JT1962]

MSC canceled one of my excursions on the Divina in October and refunded it as OBC. It was less than the gratuities charge, but I assume any amount not used would have been refunded to my registered credit card. 
 

As an FYI, I normally prefer independent excursions as well, but I booked several excursions through MSC on my 19 day Divina cruise and enjoyed them. They were not overcrowded as I had experienced with other cruise lines and were priced at or below independent excursions, when booked in advance with the pre-booking discount. The one excursion that was canceled was in Port Canaveral for back-to-back cruisers only, so I wasn’t shocked the minimum number of 25 passengers did not sign up.