Hi everyone,
We're caught between a rock and a hard place. We're cruising to Norway including Svalbard, and offship excursions are slim, since it's a small port and two ships are there that day. After speaking with many tour companies, I learned that the ships buy up the excursions forcing passengers to do MSC excursions.
My choice is (same price) offshore adventure that meets 2 hours after docking, but cancellation fee starts at 5% (standard for the location) and goes up to 100% cancellation fee within 2 weeks, or book with MSC, which requires 80 people to participate in order to operate.
We like both excursion options, but we don't typically do ship options simply because of the crowds. The offline one is a risk of losing the money if for any reason our ship doesn't make it to port, or if we're late and can't make the tour, but there would only be 12 people on that excursion (the main pro).
Vs the MSC option which I would assume would get 80 takers (their ships carry 4000+ passengers), but I won't know until we're there. If they cancel, I assume we get our money back (we'll probably be fighting for a refund as we always do with MSC), but more importantly, what if it cancels and we end up getting to do nothing or get moved to a less desirable tour?
I guess my questions are, has anyone had experience with getting a refund from an MSC canceled excursion? Does it become OBC?
Have anyone experienced a Norway cruise where the Svalbard landing was canceled/late due to weather?
Thanks in advance.