Tendering/Excursion Question

[disneygirl8]

Our ship will arrive in Belize at 7am. We have a 9am excursion with Yhoni cave tubing. How does the tendering work? How early should we line up to tender off the ship? How long does the whole process take? Will we be a lower priority because our excursion was not arranged thru Royal Carribean?

[mrleo33]

The people who booked ship sponsored tours will be given priority boarding on the first tenders. They will ask to see your tickets, so unless you are extremely talented at being persuasive then best to wait until the tenders are available to everyone else. (I got away with it, but it wasn't easy, but then again no one else was in line behind us so it didn't really matter, but they were turning people away who didn't book ship's tours and the tender wasn't even near full)

Any tour operator worth their salt will know if the ship is running on time or behind schedule and will make the necessary adjustments to accomodate you if at all possible. It takes about 15 minutes to tender ashore once underway.

If by chance the worst case scenario happens and your tour leaves without you. All is not lost, you will find lots of other tour operators carrying signs looking for people to fill their tours and you will find plenty doing cave tubing, shark ray alley, etc... One of our best excursions ever was in Belize after we showed up on time and found out our tour operater left without us to accomodate people on a different ship who had to be back before we did. We thought it was a terrible debaucle. It turned out that we had a much better time on the tour we found on the fly, than the people who went on the tour we were supposed to be on.

So chill, relax, do the best you can to get off the ship as quickly as possible and what happens, happens. It will be OK.

[WeLoveOurVacations]

We recently sailed on the Royal Caribbean Legend of the Seas. There was a total of five ships in port that day. Our ship arrived at 7am and there were no tender tickets required that day. Just shortly after 7am we went to the waiting area to board the tender. After waiting for a ship excursion group to board, we were able to get on. Once outside the pier area, you will find cavetubing.com guides to direct you to a bus. We were the first bus to get to the river giving us plenty of time to do two caves. Highly recommend cavetubing.com - they have so much fun you can't help having fun too!

[DonMar]

I guess there are many different ways that tendering is handled - based on cruise line. I was on the Carnival Legend and we got off on the second tender because we had tour that started at 8:00am - ship time.

 

The impression that we got via speaking with people and reading the Capers was that the cruise excursions would be the only people off the ship between 7 and 9am. We spoke to the Purser's Desk and they told us to meet in the tendering meeting location at 7am and to have our excursion reservation papers (with start time).

 

 

 

The ship is focused on getting their excursion off so you need to make some noise and create awareness that you need to get off too. We were politely aggressive and we got off along with other CC members with private tours with no problem.

 

 

So my advice to you would be to speak to the purser's desk and confirm the "rules of engagement" for tendering, create awareness (politely) of your situation and have your private excursion documents ready.

 

 

 

Hope this helps.