New Shore Excursions

[2rg]

We just received our latest Mariner Magazine and it mentioned a new shore excursion program which offered a car and english speaking driver/tour guide for half or whole day personal tour, you pick what your seeing. Is this a brand new program or has it already started? Has anyone tried it if its not new? We are considering a Europe cruise next year and this sounds interesting. Thanks for any help. 2rg

[localady]

The price of this service, at least in the Baltic was huge!! (In excess of 1000$ for the day just for the car and driver!:eek: ) We are going to see if we can contact private local companies for our Baltic cruise next summer!:cool:

[digby]

We just received our latest Mariner Magazine and it mentioned a new shore excursion program which offered a car and english speaking driver/tour guide for half or whole day personal tour, you pick what your seeing. Is this a brand new program or has it already started? Has anyone tried it if its not new? We are considering a Europe cruise next year and this sounds interesting. Thanks for any help. 2rg

For every port HAL sails to?

[TedC]

This option was available for our May cruise. Very pricey, IMO. I think you could do much better with private drivers, guides.

However, with this option you do have HAL backing it up, which probably is worth something.

[RuthC]

It would appear that sufficient passengers are forgoing HAL tours and booking private cars that HAL has decided if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

This option was available on my cruise this summer; I thought it was frightfully expensive. I checked prices for private tours in a couple of ports and found them much cheaper if you stayed away from HAL sponsorship.

[2rg]

Digby, we're not sure which ports will have this tour but it is something we are considering.

Thanks for the information. We expected it to be pricey. We'll have to further investigate this tour option. We're considering it because we want to go well out of the port and visit the town my ancestors come from. At this point I'm not even sure how far that is. By using HAL we would be sure the ship is waiting for us.