First time cruisers - Where to find reviews of Celebrity Excursions?

[westscot]

First time time cruisers here. Just wondered if worth booking directly with Celebrity for on-shore excursions or go direct with local vendors. Is there anywhere reputable which could be used to look at reviews of particular tours for our upcoming Mediterranean cruise? Where is best place to find reputable local vendors which pick up and drop off at same locations as the ones organised by Celebrity, as presumably could save quite a lot of money this way? Is it worth arranging ourselves?

 

We have $450 OBC for this particular cruise. Is it a good use of the OBC to spend this on some excursions booked directly through Celebrity?

Edited March 26, 2023 by westscot

[jelayne]

There is a Ports of Call section of Cruise Critic that can be very helpful for individual ports and checking the experience of others with a particular tour guide.

 

Trip Advisor is also a good resource and if you haven’t joined the Roll Call for your cruise I would recommend that.  Others on your sailing may be putting together small groups tours that you could join. Also some on your sailing probably have need to some of the ports and will have suggestions.

 

[Arizona Wildcat]

Agree with going to roll call and ports of call.  The problem is most excursion operators are new as are the excursions since cruising restarted.  Many old operators went out of business.   So reviews that are not recent are often not very relevant.

Also remember people tend to post complaints more than compliments. 

[NutsAboutGolf]

4 minutes ago, Arizona Wildcat said:

Agree with going to roll call and ports of call.  The problem is most excursion operators are new as are the excursions since cruising restarted.  Many old operators went out of business.   So reviews that are not recent are often not very relevant.

Also remember people tend to post complaints more than compliments. 

Just adding that many operators that catered to cruisers didn’t have those passengers for a year and a half so many either went out of business or they converted their operations to cater to land based guests 

[NutsAboutGolf]

You basically have two main factors with cruise tours, one is the tour/attraction itself and the other is the tour vendor/operator.  The tour/attraction rarely changes while the tour operator may or may not change.  Often you can find the tour/attraction reviews itself on TripAdvisor; you can also get a sense of if it’s something you can do cheaper and/or DIY.  The vendor/operator is tougher to track down as they can and do change

[njsweetie]

Have always done excursions through Celebrity with great success and like having peace of mind. You are still giving business to locals because locals run these tours. It’s annoying the reviews are not on Celebrity’s website but I’ve been able to find them on the internet if you Google the title of the excursion.

[Vagabond Knight]

Perhaps surprisingly to some, this is area in which Carnival is way ahead of Royal/Celebrity.  Carnival allows their guests to rate and review the excursions they take that were offered by the cruise line. When browsing their excursions, you can see how many people reviewed it, the overall rating, and separate ratings for value, for reliability/convenience, and for fun.  Not only are there number ratings, but guests can also provide detailed reviews of their experience which reeeeally helps others figure out if it's the excursion they want to take. In particular, I love being able to read reviews along with the ratings, because one person's "Oh, this was terrible because..." may describe something that would not be an issue for me. I really wish Royal/Celebrity would start offering this capability.

 

Edited March 27, 2023 by Vagabond Knight

[RTR 21-0]

Our first Celebrity cruise is coming up and found it frustrating there were no reviews on their excursions.  I cut & paste the name or description of some of the ones we were interested in on Google and quite a few popped up on other cruise lines with reviews.  May want to try that route.   

[weaveaway68]

Theres a website called....... WHATSINPORT.COM,... your cruise guide to 1200 ports. We always look on here and gives lots of information. I know its not about reviews but gives a good indication of where you are in port. Whether you can walk to anywhere etc etc. Easy to navigate website too.

Edited March 30, 2023 by weaveaway68

[1Virgo]

If you are ending or starting your cruise in Rome, we hired Rome Driving tours and really thought worth it. .  The price was not much more than what Celebrity offered, but we had the advantage of not having to wait for people.  We also saw a lot more.   The company contacted us ahead of time to get an idea of what we were interested in, and gave us tips.   driver was excellent.     We saw things that those on the bus tour did not.  

[jean87510]

On 3/27/2023 at 5:27 PM, Vagabond Knight said:

Perhaps surprisingly to some, this is area in which Carnival is way ahead of Royal/Celebrity.  Carnival allows their guests to rate and review the excursions they take that were offered by the cruise line. When browsing their excursions, you can see how many people reviewed it, the overall rating, and separate ratings for value, for reliability/convenience, and for fun.  Not only are there number ratings, but guests can also provide detailed reviews of their experience which reeeeally helps others figure out if it's the excursion they want to take. In particular, I love being able to read reviews along with the ratings, because one person's "Oh, this was terrible because..." may describe something that would not be an issue for me. I really wish Royal/Celebrity would start offering this capability.

 

I do this whenever I have to do a ship excursion that involves a long transfer or a ferry or both.  I always look at Carnival website at the reviews.  I usually read the 2, 3 and 4 star ones as the 5 stars always seem to have the phrase shout out to "so and so" which makes me suspect "so and so" wrote the review.  People are pretty honest in the 2-4 star with pictures and descriptions.  This is something where Celebrity could save themselves headaches afterwards and post reviews so that people could decide beforehand that a 2 hour ride to Chichen Itza isn't worth it.  

[peanut head]

Years ago Celebrity used to have reviews listed with their shore excursions which I had found so helpful.  There was positive and negative and both shed light on what I could (or could not) expect.  Too bad Celebrity did away with that feature.