When to book shore excursions for Treasures of Greek Islands?

Going on trip at the end of next month and just starting to focus on shore excursions. I have read posts about needing to book early on Tahiti and places where limited space on snorkling or tours like that, but wondered if advisable to do so for some of these tours in Greece.I read somewhere that they will do a ship board talk on board re options, but should we do some now? Also, can’t find cancellation policy on website for excursions. One place said you find out date for cancellation on some booklet you get on board. Tried to see if anyone has posted this kind of question for Greece, but couldn't find one so excuse me if this is an “asked and answered” already question!

I do believe cancelation of ship tours is 24 hours but if you call WS they can tell you. We have used tour companies Tours by Locals and Greek Life., Homeric Tours,Viator. I email them tell them what exactly I want to see/do, amount of people with me, length, ship ( never taken anything but WS etc) I am not a group person always looking for driver alone or guide and driver. Hope this helps. Happy Sailing.

I went on this cruise last summer and booked an excursion at almost every port of call. They were well organized, interesting and gave us an opportunity to meet and spend time with other people on the cruise. Our favorite was the catamaran trip at Santorini! I wouldn’t hesitate to book early on. Have fun!

One note on cruise sponsored excursions and the website. If you look up the cruise without logging into the website, it will show you all of the excursions. If you log in with your booking number, you'll only be able to see the excursions that are not currently full. We mostly book our own excursions, but often look at what the ship is offering to get an idea of what's interesting, and checking without logging in is the best way to see all of them.

How cool! We'll be on WS for this one Aug. 11th. Fourth time. Slightly different itinerary. We've done it both ways. Booked tours prior and booked onboard. Never had a problem. It helps to hear the "night before" talk on the various excursions though. If this is your first Greek cruise and/or WS trip....you're in for a treat. Our favorite ship in their fleet! Cheers.

We sometimes book the WS excursions and then look for things we'd like better and cancel if we find something-- as long as it's 24 hour in advance you should be fine.

Many thanks for the responses! I thought I would follow-up with what decisions we made about tour booking for this trip and how it worked out.

After reading various discussions on the pros and cons of booking the ship's tours, other companies etc, we decided we wanted as stress-free a vacation as possible and didn't have time to review all the other options for private tours etc, nor did we want to spend a lot of time while on the trip making decisions. So, we booked tours for every day while we were still at home, could do some internet checking on destinations and make decisions in a fairly relaxed advanced way. As to whether it was necessary to book ahead of time, the answer turned out to be yes in some cases or no problem in others. Each evening the tour director would go over the next day tours and indicate on the power-point which ones still had space available. On the first day, the four or five tours offered had numbers like 5 or 7 seats still available; as the week went by, more and more of them were full and displayed in red. A couple of tours, like the one to St John's cave on Patmos (which was very good) were sold out the night before already. It was also interesting that the tour director said to see him if you wanted to "trade" a tour on a particular day; could be done if there was still space available. You could also cancel 24 hours in advance, but the time was a little awkward as most tours started at 8 or 8:30, so you would most likely have to cancel on a Tuesday night for a Thursday tour.

All the tours were great - they tended to be four or so hours in the morning so we could sightsee in mornings, get back to ship in afternoon for swimming or dipping in the splash pool and reading or napping on the deck. In a place like Greece, we really wanted to visit the ancient ruins and see the sights; there were certainly others on the ship who wanted to go into towns to shop and eat or find a quiet nearby beach to spend the day. Everyone has a different vision for how they want to spend the week; for us, stress-free escorted sightseeing was what worked well. One comment I wanted to make was re the ratings for easy/moderate/strenuous for the tours. We enjoy walking but the term strenuous was a little scary, but we really wanted to visit Delos. It was fine; a fair amount of flat walking but hardly any hills (I guess you could find some hills to walk up during the free time, but tour stayed on fairly even ground. If anyone has any questions about specific level of difficulties, would be happy to answer. There were a couple that had some uphill terrains (into the castle type thing) that were slightly more challenging, but not too hard. On most of the tours, we were divided into two groups, about 15 in size for the actual tour with about 28-30 people on the tour bus itself. It made it seem like a more intimate tour having two separate guides

One last comment on the stress-free pro of booking with the ship itself. On our morning in Athens before boarding the ship, we did book a tour with a local company for what was listed as a five hour tour of highlights of Athens from your hotel with guarantee that your would get to your boat for departure. It brought on all the stresses that we were able to avoid by staying with the Windstar tours on the islands. Although the website and confirmation all promised pick-up at our hotel at 8:30 (which we hoped would avoid our trying to get to some place for the tour to start or waiting for a driver to show up), three days before we left home, we got an email saying that the tour would start at a different hotel at 7:55...we had to do a 15 minute walk thru confusing streets in Athens (yeah, it looked straight forward on google maps, but it never works out that way), and then sit on their bus as they stopped at some other hotels for 45 minutes; then it turned out that the 5 hours would bring us back to our hotel way past the time we needed to leave for the terminal, so we ended up leaving the tour early, hopping in an expensive cab (because it was such a short ride) to get to the pickup point for the ride to the Windstar terminal. That experience made me treasure the ease with which the Windstar tours worked directly from the ship.

We have also noted that paying for tours online when we first book the sailing saves money. In the case of Alaska, the prices went up on the tours that were very popular. Each zodiac tour went up $20 or $30 from when we booked to a month before sailing. We did 3 zodiac tours, x 2 people. A couple of others went up about $25 pp. If you wind up cancelling within time guidelines money is credited back so booking early is a good deal.

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