New Zealand

[Scubadoc]

We are on the 14 day crown princess New Zealand cruise February 8 of next year. I thought I was planning early, but I just saw that one of the shore excursions we wanted is already on a waiting list!

 

Anyone have some great planning ideas already about New Zealand? We have been on the Crown princess already for 20 days so glad to answer questions about the ship. But never been to New Zealand.

 

We are Lord of the rings fans and hope to do at least two days seeing Lord of the rings sites. The problem is we really want to see the Hot Springs in Rotorua and do the Hobbiton tour. It looks like both of those are from the same port of Tauranga. 
 

So we are trying to figure out all of these complex plans!

[Steelers36]

1 hour ago, Scubadoc said:

We are on the 14 day crown princess New Zealand cruise February 8 of next year. I thought I was planning early, but I just saw that one of the shore excursions we wanted is already on a waiting list!

 

Anyone have some great planning ideas already about New Zealand? We have been on the Crown princess already for 20 days so glad to answer questions about the ship. But never been to New Zealand.

 

We are Lord of the rings fans and hope to do at least two days seeing Lord of the rings sites. The problem is we really want to see the Hot Springs in Rotorua and do the Hobbiton tour. It looks like both of those are from the same port of Tauranga. 
 

So we are trying to figure out all of these complex plans!

You should check out the destinations forum for NZ and probably get lots of ideas there.

 

When we did the NZ cruise out of SYD, we rented a car in every port I think (maybe one exception?) and did our own touring around to see sites.  Was not interested in LOTR things, but we did get to the hot springs.  And some wineries and saw some great scenery and other stuff.  I would recommend self-touring if you cannot find a suitable ship tour.

 

We also do independent small-group tours over ship tours in any case, but NZ seemed like a good place to get out on the highway and see the countryside.

[Thrak]

1 hour ago, Scubadoc said:

We are Lord of the rings fans and hope to do at least two days seeing Lord of the rings sites. The problem is we really want to see the Hot Springs in Rotorua and do the Hobbiton tour. It looks like both of those are from the same port of Tauranga. 

 

Be aware that, if you want to do Hobbiton, you can not count on a Princess tour. We did Hobbiton last year and they stopped accepting cruise ship tours. During the pandemic they lost about a zillion dollars due to accepting a ton of reservations from cruise ship companies and then having the ship either not port or having other problems causing all of those reservations to go unused so they had no paying visitors.

 

I booked way early and privately (even though Princess assured me their excursion was going to be okay) and was glad I did as Princess eventually dropped the excursion. If Princess does offer an excursion to Hobbiton don't trust them. Booking privately they will pick you up at the port and return you there in plenty of time for all aboard.

 

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the tour company we booked with was only accepting 10 people from our cruise. That was it. Once they had 10 people booked they were done. It was also much less expensive than the original excursion listed by Princess.

Edited April 28 by Thrak

[DCThunder]

There are a lot of Hobbitown excursions listed on Viator and/or TripAdvisor.  I also found a interesting small group tour of Auckland on ToursByLocals.  Get out of the ship tours rut and look around at what else is out there.

[Arizona Wildcat]

New Zealand as said has dozens of companies doing shore excursions.  A Google search of your desired destination and cruise ship shore excursion will give you several choices.

Many companies will not pay the commission the cruise company charges and can only handle 10-30.

Book direct.

[DCThunder]

Just now, Arizona Wildcat said:

New Zealand as said has dozens of companies doing shore excursions.  A Google search of your desired destination and cruise ship shore excursion will give you several choices.

Many companies will not pay the commission the cruise company charges and can only handle 10-30.

Book direct.

This times 100000

[Yehootu]

2 hours ago, Scubadoc said:

It looks like both of those are from the same port of Tauranga. 

We just did a tour to Hobbiton last week with the company I'll list below. They had 4 tickets left on the morning of the tour that got grabbed at the port. I booked WAY in advanced. They will not accept cruiseship tours. I had it booked through Princess and it was cancelled so I booked this company. Very good tour, even though I've never read or seen any of the books.

[Expatcat]

We cruised to NZ pre-Covid and used the company Yehootu has posted above. They have a combined Hobbiton and hot springs excursion from Tauranga that we took. It was a long day but worth it and they are a great company.

 

We are cruising again to NZ January next year. We enjoyed Hobbiton so much we have booked to go again. Hot springs were a once and done for us. We have booked through same company again.