Vancouver inquiries

After our cruise tour we plan to spend 2 days in Vancouver. Considering staying at the Radisson Airport hotel, any opinions? Touring the city, considering the Land Sea company, the Hop on Hop off Shuttle or the Big Bus-which one do you recommend to use? Need to get from cruise port to hotel-your recommendations? Also, when doing a cruise tour with Holland, how do recommend to pack bags for traveling? Thanks

After our cruise tour we plan to spend 2 days in Vancouver. Considering staying at the Radisson Airport hotel, any opinions? Touring the city, considering the Land Sea company, the Hop on Hop off Shuttle or the Big Bus-which one do you recommend to use? Need to get from cruise port to hotel-your recommendations? Also, when doing a cruise tour with Holland, how do recommend to pack bags for traveling? Thanks

First of all I would look for a hotel in the downtown area. The Radisson Airport Hotel is in Richmond. Richmond is a long way from many of the Vancouver tourist attractions.

You'll need to pack a small bag for everyday items. Your larger luggage will be carried on the bus but might not be accessable at every stop.

After our cruise tour we plan to spend 2 days in Vancouver. Considering staying at the Radisson Airport hotel, any opinions? Touring the city, considering the Land Sea company, the Hop on Hop off Shuttle or the Big Bus-which one do you recommend to use? Need to get from cruise port to hotel-your recommendations? Also, when doing a cruise tour with Holland, how do recommend to pack bags for traveling? Thanks

As previous poster said. Get a hotel downtown Vancouver. Use the HoHo buses or walk. When we got off the Jewel last month they had taxis lined up everywhere!. I'm not sure how it works with HAL but it was super easy with NCL. We did not dock at Canada Place it was the other port across town so it took a few minutes to get to the hotel. We stayed at the Blue Horizon on Robson Street. Great location and reasonable prices.

If you have time go visit Capilano Suspension Bridge! We spent two days in Vancouver after our cruise and did not even begin to see everything there is to see there. It's a beautiful place to visit and we will go back one day and spend more time there.

Agree that you should stay somewhere downtown. We did the HOHO trolley the first time we went. It took 2 hours if you stayed on the whole time. We hopped off and on a few times and spent about 5 hours. If we hadn't been meeting friends for dinner, we would have have spent more time exploring Stanley Park.

This year we walked around on our own one day and went to Capilano Park the next day. That was a fun day as well.

We took the train to and from the airport. Super easy and way cheaper than a cab. We were staying at the Pan Pacific, so the trolley and (free!) bus to Capilano were right outside. The skytrain was a couple of blocks away.

I'll third the advice to stay downtown if it's within your budget - a quick check of the Radisson showed rates of c. $140 a night end of July next summer (nonrefundable) and $180 refundable. The higher end of that scale would definitely get you a solid downtown hotel using Priceline etc. ('blind' bidding in Vancouver is very safe because anything rated 4* in the downtown core area will simply never be a bad hotel).

If you did stick to the Radisson, I would say that it's possibly the best of the airport hotels in terms of location - basically next-door to Aberdeen station on the Canada Line, so if you use transit you could be downtown within a half hour including walk time from the hotel for $4pp. Getting to the hotel from the ship you can certainly take large suitcases on the trains, as long as you are physically capable of maneuvering them around on the level - if you can't manage this with all your baggage, take a cab to the hotel for c. $35.

There's a wide array of (mostly Asian) food options in the three(!) malls surrounding you (Aberdeen, Yaohan & Presidents Centres), including 2 supermarkets (both of which carry mostly Asian-focused food but do have all the basics like snacks, soda, etc. at decent prices).

If you were planning to take a cab to & from the hotel, forget it and book downtown - that's $70 a day extra to spend on your room right there...

As to how to tour - with a couple of days, I would definitely recommend HOHO over a regular tour. You see more, you can reuse your tickets the whole time you're in town, and they're cheaper than Landsea. Never used Big Bus, so cannot fairly compare to Trolley which I have used. It's unlikely many people could give a personal comparison between multiple HOHOs unless they were a long time apart, so use Tripadvisor, Google, etc. to assess which you think is best.

HOHO routes always go in one direction though, so they rarely make a good replacement for transit when trying to get somewhere. Our downtown core is small and eminently walkable, but transit and/or cabs can still be used strategically to get between sites that are at opposite ends of downtown (it's a rare cabfare that exceeds $10 around downtown, and transit is $2.75pp for 90 minutes, with various discounts for multiple tickets or being a Senior that might apply). If you do stay out at the airport, a day pass on transit will be a very, very useful thing to buy ($9.75pp).

Book your HOHO trolley on line in advance and you get the second day free.

Have a great time. I also vote for going to Capilano Suspension Bridge.

Lynn