Excursion booking on board

[ylimaster]

Just realized that we missed the cut-off date of booking excursion with Celebrity online. Is there a way to find out how many spaces are still available for the excursion? Is it safe to use the local tourist companies at the pier?

 

35-45CM of snow are expected this coming Sunday, after the cruise vacation, we sure have lots of snow to blow.

[6502programmer]

Just realized that we missed the cut-off date of booking excursion with Celebrity online. Is there a way to find out how many spaces are still available for the excursion? Is it safe to use the local tourist companies at the pier?

 

Best bet for capacity is to check the excursion desk on board. As for "safe", that all depends. CC has a pretty good set of boards dedicated to various ports of call. You can use these to get a feel for folks' experience with local providers in the ports you'll be visiting. You may also want to look on CC for your sailing's roll call to see what other folks are up to and whether you can hitch along with them.

 

Personally, I've never had a problem, either booking in advance on my own with a provider or with finding something to do at the port, but I'm also pretty easy to please.

[BPutnam]

You might like to do your research on the Celebrity shore excursions while at home even if you book on the ship. My experience was that the folks working at the shore excursion desk were not as knowledgeable as I expected. I was able to find out a lot more information about the excursions here on Cruise Critic and even on the Celebrity website than on the ship. In one case the information provided on board was actually wrong.

I booked some with Celebrity before hand, some on the ship, and some independantly and they were all fantastic. But, I was glad I had done the research first.

[phoenix_dream]

We've used local tourist companies and/or local taxi drivers in many ports with no issues at all. Alot depends on which ports you are talking about. For the majority of ports in the Eastern or Western Carribbean (not sure which side you are sailing to) you should have no problem getting a tour in the port. If you have a particular interest in something where space may be limited (meaning space in total for the port) - such as swimming with dolphins for example - then you probably want to either arrange ahead of time via the internet, or book with the ship when you board. Best idea is to read the ports section of CC for advice.

[Classynfun1]

If you are doing the Western Itinerary on the Eclipse, no worries! I booked all my excursions with vendors at the port on my 11/27 Eclipse cruise. The ports were full of vendors and if you want to do something, you will be accommodated!

 

Wish I could go back..