Steer

I'm pretty certain that you will be able to find plenty of quiet spaces. We certainly did in the summer.

The 2 cruises we went on, the coach driver told everyone on the way down to ignore the disembark time given and either request an early one or just get off early. Also someone from P&O got onto the coach when we arrived at the terminal and told us to ask for early disembarkation times. Of course, what happened both times is similar to OP's story, with us waiting nearly 2 hours for the stragglers to arrive from the buffet, with our coach being the last one out of the car park. It is pretty much the only thing that I could find fault with on either holiday. I don't see how difficult it is for P&O booking system to have a tick box for all on coach transfers and then ensure that those passengers are all given a similar leaving slot.

We just got back from there. The local ferry takes about an hour. It costs almost the same on the local ferry as with the official P&O excursion to Geiranger. P&O had three or four different excursions to Geiranger and beyond, the cheapest of which was more or less just a ferry to the town and you are left to explore. By the time we decided to do this, the official P&O trips were fully booked (we left it far too late). I did not like the thought of the return ferry being late and us missing departure if we went on an unofficial outing, so instead we just got on one of those open top red bus tours, which went through some mountain valleys to a different fjord, and despite my fairly low expectations it was absolutely excellent. Anyway, this just gives us an excuse to go back at some point and actually visit Geiranger.

New member here. Quite a few years ago (maybe 15) I worked on a massive insurance claim made by a cruise company, for a number of cancelled sailings. One of my jobs was to determine the loss of revenue to the cruise company. As you can imagine, one of the 1st questions we asked was how much a passenger pays for their cruise. There was actually no set answer. When we actually started to dig down into the figures, we could see that early bookers got an early discount, direct bookers got a direct booking discount. Bookers via a travel agent got a travel agent discount. And the late bookers also got a discount because the cruise was not fully booked. All the discounts varied slightly, but not by much. After spending a long time analysing the figures, we did not see any particular trend or indication as to the best way to get a significantly cheaper cruise. Perhaps times have changed, and perhaps different cruise lines operate different pricing structures. But having since become a fan of cruises, even though I did a lot of work on those claims, I don't think that there is a magic answer that will end up saving you a huge amount of money. One cruise company we use sometimes offer pretty good value last minute deals on under booked cruises - but they tend to be the shorter and less exotic voyages.