Heads up about Butts-up!

I thought I should share our experience with Butts-up (cave-tubing dot com). I had pre-booked our group of 27 including several children and ended up with a group of 30, which they said was fine in our reservation email. We got in line early for tender tickets on our ship to get off the boat as soon as we could. When we arrived via the tenders, we found the reps very easily. We had to wait a little bit for our transportation to arrive, which was fine. Our guide, Chico, was very nice and informative on our trip out to the caves. He asked when our last Tender back to the ship was and we let him know it was at 4:30. He assured us we had plenty of time for our drive up, the cave tour, lunch, and the trip back. We noticed there were large trucks and other buses passing ours on the drive up, but didn't think much of it.

When we got to the cave area, things were pretty chaotic. It took a while for us to get our helmets and life jackets. That was around noon - no shade around the bus where we were told to wait. There weren't any child-sized life jackets which was disappointing so little kids weren't very comfortable in the adult sized jackets they had to wear. Helmet's weren't much better - some were missing clasps or lights weren't working. We were told it didn't matter - we just had to have them. Our guide seemed like he was trying to recruit other tour guides to come with our group, but only found 1. So we ended up with a group of 30 people and only 2 tour guides. There is supposed to be 1 guide for every 8 people, so we should have had 4 guides. We made the hike to where we get our tubes, and there were no tubes with bottoms (our guide thought there would be for the little kids) and so we put the little kids in our laps which got us down to 25 tubes. It was nice that we didn't have to carry our tubes up, which some companies did. Our guide ended up with 15 tubes, and the guide he recruited had 10. It took quite a while for them to get the tubes all sorted out, arranged, and connected before we got in the river. The trip down the river was ok. For those of us with kids in our laps it was harder to get "butts-up" because of the weight in our tubes and our tubes seemed to drag through the shallow areas. The guides pointed out some cool formations and that was cool. Several groups passed us while on the river - I'm guessing we were slower because our guides had so many tubes to wrangle.

When we got to the end, that's when it finally seemed like we were rushed. We dropped off our helmets and life jackets and got back on the bus. We were told we'd need to take our lunch "to go" instead of stopping to eat. We didn't want to miss the boat so we were fine with that. We raised concern about the time and were again re-assured that we'd make it back in time. One of the guides was pretty rude to my dad about it.

We were getting close to the port when our bus broke down. By this point, it was already after 4:30, when the last tender was supposed to leave so we were pretty stressed out. It was fortunate that another one of their buses was near and able to turn around and take us to the port before we had to wait too long. We did make it back to our ship, but we didn't arrive at the port until after 4:40. We didn't have time to shop, and it created a very stressful situation for all of us.

This didn't seem like it was the typical excursion for Butts-Up, but I think people should know what was possible. We weren't offered any sort of compensation for the late arrival or anything like that. We thought it would be more fun to go as a big family. If we were going to do it again, I'd probably just have individual families book independently so we'd have smaller groups. I'd also wait until I got off the bus at the port to give any sort of tip, or even to pay if I could put it off.

This is interesting, we also had a bus break down on the way back in Septmember. We had plenty of time but the family on Carnival was running to the last tender.

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Scary, in Belize I like to do a carnival excursion. Once we broke down in the water and another boat had to come get us. Another time we got back and ran to the last tender boat. Yikes!

We usually don't do private excursions for that very reason in tender ports.

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I have never tried a non cruise line sponsored excursion because of the fact that the ship will leave

Yes can save a little $ but not worth the risk

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We just got back yesterday from our cruise on the Carnival Freedom...we did the ships excursion cave tubing. We saw the ButtsUp vendor at the port, so we knew we would see them at the JaguarPaw outpost. Sure enough, we were there with tons of other groups, which was fine...except for that group. They were rude, the guide actually wanted to pass us, so he came up and shoved our tubes over to the side! Really! He then came up in front of us, and then blocked a narrow section so we couldn't go back by when he stopped to show them something...then he proceeded to climb up on the bank along the way, then jump into his tube splashing his group.. they thought it was funny. I did not. Climbing on the bank was not cool in my opinion, and his rudeness to get in front of our group was tacky at best. Our guide was classy though and didn't say anything to him in front of us...but I am sure he took note of it to bring up later with the facility. This guy was just all over the place, loud and obnoxious, and had no problem acting like he owned the cave and river.

Just my opinion of what happened to us this week.

robin