seabourn_noob

If you go on the Source App, and then select [View More] on Gourmet Dining, and then select The Club, you can get a current bar list for the ship today... although it could change of course when your particular cruise started and the particular ship (this is for Pursuit, although I assume it's identical to Venture). I just downloaded the list, which for Bourbon had: Basil Hayden, Bulleit and Woodford Reserve and Blanton's for an additional $20 File attached club_menu_update_lastlastlast.pdf

You're overthinking it, but only slightly! No... it is not weird at all to take lunch alone on the pool deck. Or breakfast in the Colonnade. It is definitely not weird to leave the ship for a few hours and do some personal exploring... but getting back to the ship on time is on you. Seabourn will send you an embarkation time. People take these (in my limited experience) as suggestions more than commands. Seabourn is just trying to spread out check-ins, but the actual embarkation practice is pretty quick. Welcome!

I want to thank everyone for their experienced comments. Expedition cruising is new to me, and I now suspect that my real problem stems from Seabourn's decision to shoehorn guest interactions on these cruises into their website better suited for regular cruises. Why have a "book shore excursions" section when there are none to book? Why allow (and indeed encourage) people to prebook spa dates when the scheduling is too fluid to accommodate efficient pre booking?

Thanks. That does help. It means that such appointments are best booked on sea days...

We have booked a Kimberley cruise on Pursuit. How can we book other shipboard activities (in particular, spa appointments) if we don't know when the Zodiac excursions happen on a particular day/ Are they staggered through the day?

Yep... that's very different. And if I were subject to rules like that, I would wait around for deals to book anything. PS: I've gotten $3,000 OBC (we have 3 V4 cabins) and I'm waitlisted for the upgrades. So it has all worked out, at the cost of eternal vigilance,.

I agree... It's similar. I guess I just need to ratchet down my expectations of everything. To your example, department stores (remember department stores?) Would routinely give good customers a few days break on a sale, but I admit that stopped around 10 years ago...just around the time department stores stopped making money.

I've heard (and seen) the same thing, but this is an example of what I'm talking about. The companies that treat their customers well (while still making a profit, of course) are the ones that gain long-run customer loyalty, which (if your product is good) is much more lucrative than a short-term couple of thousand bucks.

I do not. And I'm not trying to compare Seabourn with any other line. (I've sailed on Seabourn, Crystal, Oceania, and its semi-predecessor Renaissance. ). But this case seems particularly odd, since the cruise line doesn't have anything they can count on until 6 months before the cruise, and you'd think they'd have an eye towards keeping those booked but uncommitted customers happy. And of course if the sailing is already pretty full, they clearly can exclude any particular cruise from the offer. Again, this could be common in the cruise industry, but to take another example, I just ordered a car that took five months to arrive, but the dealer automatically added current incentives when I took possession without my asking.

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find a good Seabourn discussion on it. You book a cruise well in advance. In my case I'm on the June 22nd Pursuit cruise which doesn't require any committment at all (10%) until 2/23. Then they announce today two category upgrades and "up to $2000" in OBC. Why should I, or my travel agent, have to monitor these sales? Obviously I can rebook and take advantage of the sale. And clearly if I were Seabourn offering such a sale, I'd expect everyone who had already booked to do so. But wouldn't Seabourn get great credit from the customer (they certainly would from me) if they just automatically offered the deal to customers who could rebook at no cost? By forcing me (or my travel agent) to play this game. they certainly lose goodwill from me. Maybe they don't care... but it doesn't seem like a great way to treat a customer.

I fully agree that missing the ship is the biggest thing that line-based excursions have going for them. As to the fact (if it's a fact) that the cruise lines all use the same tour companies, it raises a different set of questions: (a) then why are they more expensive? Shouldn't the pricing power of the cruise lines reduce prices? (b) who is vetting these tours? who is curating the sights visited? who is rating the guides? (c) shouldn't there be a value proposition for a cruise line in offering better tours than their competitors? why would you give up a potential competitive advantage by simply going with the tour companies everyone else uses?

Maybe you're right and nobody is any good at this any more. I will say that on our last cruise, barely pre-pandemic (Jan. 2020) on Crystal (Danube riverboat), the shore excursions offered were uniformly good, IMO, and Crystal offered both free tours and somewhat more extensive tours for a fee. But I must say that Seabourn does itself no favors offering events which are not up to the rest of their overall package.

It was Ovation 5/30-6/11. I don't think there was really much to complain about at the time.... it was just three poorly executed excursions. I did mention it to the Assistant Cruise Director at dinner on my last night aboard, and she said I should let Seabourn know. I gave this same critique on the postcruise comment form I received. I don't want to make this sound worse than it was.... They put us on buses; there was a guide; they took us where they said they would take us; they got us back on time. It was just substantially worse, in terms of both content and price, than similar excursions I arranged on my own. It was more the contrast with the first-class level of everything else.

I don't claim to be an dedicated cruiser... this was our fifth cruise in 25 years. And this was our first Seabourn cruise. Everything about the ship itself: service, food, entertainment, design, cleanliness -- was outstanding and beyond my expectations. But the shore excursions (at least the three Seabourn-sponsored ones we bought on a 12 night cruise) were third-rate at best.... and overpriced. With minimal research, I put together a competing whale-watching trip at half-price, a near-private tour of the Scottish Highlands at about 75% of the price of the bus tour offered by Seabourn, and a terrific Oslo fjord tour at about one-third the Seabourn price. The Seabourn tours I took (East Iceland highlights in Seydisfjordur, Scalloway and Ponies, and Gothenburg and the Haga District) were (IMO) poorly thought out and badly overpriced. People I spoke to on the Scottish Highlands tour confirmed that it was similarly subpar. There is no reason this should be so. Seabourn has actual staff who can vet third-party suppliers and ought to have leverage to make the tours cheaper than a guy doing Internet research on his own can do. And for a cruise line which was outstanding in everything else it was very odd. I should note that I didn't try to book "experiences" like hiking or meditation or biking tours -- just pedestrian old "show me the basic sights" stuff. Maybe those shore excursions are better. But a failure to deliver on the pedestrian stuff was striking.

Thanks. Mikhail came through... I had misspelled his email address. But I learned that if the Seabourn advisor gifts you with shipboard credit, you can't get any more from a referral.... the Cannot Be Combined rule, so both Mikhail and I were out of luck.