Royal Caribbean Roatan glass bottom boat and monkey/sloth tour

[Ideb]

I'm trying to find out more info on this excursion. It's listed as "strenuous" Does anyone know why? Also, what monkey/sloth sanctuary does it go to?

[Nike4000]

We’re interested in this excursion as well and would love to hear what others have experienced. We had a horrible experience with a submarine style excursion in Cozumel, so we’re a little hesitant to book this one. Everything else looks great - how was it in reality?

[Dunchues]

We used Victor Bodden Tours, they have a Sanctuary and although you can hold a Sloth they are very careful not to let them get stressed. They only do the interaction thing for a couple of hours in the morning,  but it's pretty good and inexpensive.  They also arranged a trip on the glass bottom boat that's located in west bay. We'll looked after boat, good ac and pretty comfortable. Trip was maybe 45 mins and was great. Also reasonably priced, I would certainly recommend Bodden Tours and we will be using them again next February on our next visit.

[Dunchues]

PS, it was about as strenuous as it looks, ie not at all! They provide a driver who'll take you to see anything you like so I suppose you could find healthy exercise type stuff, but we opted for sightseeing. 

[Pattywac]

I just booked a cruise with royal today in 2024 and hope to cross something off of my bucket list, which is to hold a sloth.  Is there one tour better than others?  In the royal excursions app it shows the sloth, monkey and boat but says “not available”.  

[Nike4000]

10 hours ago, Pattywac said:

I just booked a cruise with royal today in 2024 and hope to cross something off of my bucket list, which is to hold a sloth.  Is there one tour better than others?  In the royal excursions app it shows the sloth, monkey and boat but says “not available”.  

 

The last time we were in Roatan, we booked the Daniel Johnson Monkey & Sloth Hangout tour directly through Daniel Johnson's and it was both good and bad. 

The good was that we got to hang out with monkeys & sloths. Holding the sloth was super cool and totally worth the price of admission. Their staff was incredibly friendly and helpful - very responsive to my multiple emails in advance of our cruise. Awesome to work with and the price was great. Our driver, we were in her personal car, was amazing, friendly, and highlighted all sorts of cool & interesting things we passed along the way to the Monkey & Sloth hangout. She was a fabulous tour guide and a great driver considering that the "rules of the road" in Roatan are more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.

 

The bad included two things. First, we added the Zip Line experience to the tour and were never able to actually go on the zip lines. After our monkey & sloth encounter, our driver took us to the zip line place where we sat for nearly 2 hours waiting for the group in front of us to finish. Every time we asked, we were told "They're on the last zip line" - for 2 hours we heard this. Plus, there was another group ahead of us. We finally asked to be taken back to the ship. The people at Daniel Johnson's refunded us for the zip line experience and were very apologetic. The second negative aspect was finding our contact after debarking the ship. We had to go outside of the cruise port to get our ride and it was absolute chaos. There were tons of people crowding the gate, making locating our contact challenging. I dislike crowds and this one was huge and aggressive. I ended up getting pick pocketed while making my way to our contact (they got nothing of value) and someone tried to pull our backpack off of my wife's shoulder. It was rough and not pleasant. 

 

So, all that being said - Sloths were AWESOME & we can't wait to hold them again. But, based on our negative experience, we're going to book through Royal directly for our upcoming trip and see if the transportation experience is any better.

[Pattywac]

Thanks for sharing your experience.  My bucket list is the sloth encounter, although seeing monkeys, birds, etc would be cool too. Royal has what appears to be an excursion that would fit our needs (sloth, monkey, semi kind of sub tour) but shows it isn’t available yet. I’ve only cruised once via carnival (which I don’t recall a lag time between booking the cruise then picking excursions); this is my 1st cruise with Royal so not sure how or when they make their excursions available (we sail July 2024). Otherwise I’ll book outside of Royal, so again thanks for your insight, and I’ll check into Daniel Johnson.

[Nike4000]

We've booked the monkey, sloth, glass bottom boat excursion through Royal for our upcoming fall cruise. I'll post a reply about the experience once we've done it.

 

The excursion took a while to open up for our fall booking, so just keep an eye on it.

[Nike4000]

@Pattywac and @Ideb - we just returned from our cruise on Royal's Harmony of the Seas & we did the glass bottom boat and monkey/sloth excursion. It was fantastic! We had a great time, plus there was a bonus stop at a Roatan chocolate factory!

 

Highlights from the excursion:

• Darby, our guide, was amazing! Lots of wonderful insights into Roatan and it's culture. Plus there were prizes for answering questions correctly! Who doesn't love interactive guides?
• The bus wasn't the most comfortable, but it had air conditioning and was fully functioning. I'll take it! We had every seat full, including the jump seat and the bus handled the hills and traffic without a single issue.
• The chocolate factory was our first stop. Decent restrooms and the chocolate was great. Plus, there were a bunch of little shops to explore, which was nice. Large bottles of cold water were $2, so we stocked up on a few.
• Second stop was to see Monkeys & Sloths. Our guide (not Darby), who looked like he was about 12, shared tons of great information and spent time talking about some of Roatan's natural medicines and treatments, in addition to educating us about the monkeys & sloths. Plus, we got to hold a macaw & have our pictures taken with it on our own devices - no forced fee for the photo like some other places. Holding the sloths was so awesome. The one I was holding tried to steal my hat, very slowly. It was fun to experience. They also had decent restrooms!
• Third and final stop was the "glass bottom boat" which was really a semi-submersible. We've had bad, bad, bad experiences with these in the past, but this one was a-okay. First, it had air conditioning, which made it tolerable. Second, we actually got to see thriving sea life and some amazing coral reefs. No bathroom on board, you had to hold it.

The bad parts of the excursion were:

• Three people were late to the meeting point, so we had to return to pick them up, which added an hour to the excursion. That hour was spent in traffic, which SUCKED! One guy kept trying to get a chant going of "Leave them" and heavily criticized Darby for going back throughout the rest of the tour.
• Food was not available outside of the chocolate factory. With the 5 hour duration of the excursion, it's a long excursion to not have a lunch break or some sort of snack included.

Overall, we had a great time and will definitely consider this excursion again for future visits to Roatan. Darby was fantastic, we'd make sure to request Darby again on future trips.

[amindu]

On 11/13/2023 at 12:28 PM, Nike4000 said:

@Pattywac and @Ideb - we just returned from our cruise on Royal's Harmony of the Seas & we did the glass bottom boat and monkey/sloth excursion. It was fantastic! We had a great time, plus there was a bonus stop at a Roatan chocolate factory!

 

Highlights from the excursion:

• Darby, our guide, was amazing! Lots of wonderful insights into Roatan and it's culture. Plus there were prizes for answering questions correctly! Who doesn't love interactive guides?
• The bus wasn't the most comfortable, but it had air conditioning and was fully functioning. I'll take it! We had every seat full, including the jump seat and the bus handled the hills and traffic without a single issue.
• The chocolate factory was our first stop. Decent restrooms and the chocolate was great. Plus, there were a bunch of little shops to explore, which was nice. Large bottles of cold water were $2, so we stocked up on a few.
• Second stop was to see Monkeys & Sloths. Our guide (not Darby), who looked like he was about 12, shared tons of great information and spent time talking about some of Roatan's natural medicines and treatments, in addition to educating us about the monkeys & sloths. Plus, we got to hold a macaw & have our pictures taken with it on our own devices - no forced fee for the photo like some other places. Holding the sloths was so awesome. The one I was holding tried to steal my hat, very slowly. It was fun to experience. They also had decent restrooms!
• Third and final stop was the "glass bottom boat" which was really a semi-submersible. We've had bad, bad, bad experiences with these in the past, but this one was a-okay. First, it had air conditioning, which made it tolerable. Second, we actually got to see thriving sea life and some amazing coral reefs. No bathroom on board, you had to hold it.

The bad parts of the excursion were:

• Three people were late to the meeting point, so we had to return to pick them up, which added an hour to the excursion. That hour was spent in traffic, which SUCKED! One guy kept trying to get a chant going of "Leave them" and heavily criticized Darby for going back throughout the rest of the tour.
• Food was not available outside of the chocolate factory. With the 5 hour duration of the excursion, it's a long excursion to not have a lunch break or some sort of snack included.

Overall, we had a great time and will definitely consider this excursion again for future visits to Roatan. Darby was fantastic, we'd make sure to request Darby again on future trips.

 

Hi thanks for this summary would you say this would be something that a 2 and 4 year old would enjoy?