Celebrity West Side Treasures-Catamaran Pitons

[3boyz2keep]

I wanted to share our recent (a week ago) experience on Celebrity's West Side Treasure excursion. I had read on the boards that it was a past cruiser's favorite day so I jumped on the chance to book. I will forewarn by saying we didn't have a great experience. We were on a double decker catamaran with 100 other passengers. We made the mistake of heading to the front of the catamaran near the netting with about 30 others and couldn't hear anything at all during the cruise/tour. There was a lot of history being shared but sadly we couldn't hear it. There wasn't a chance to move to other areas as the catamaran was crowded, although they said the catamaran held 180 people and we were a group of 100. The excursion listed a chance to hike to the fort at Pigeon National Park, we didn't stop. We just sailed past-looked beautiful! (we did end up receiving 30% back once on board and stopped by the Shore Excursion desk to share our disappointment). We had a stop to snorkel at a small beach with a tiny hotel in the cove. We stopped with 2 other catamarans at the same time (picture 300 people descending on a tiny beach at once). It was overwhelming and several older participants had a really difficult time exiting the catamaran in the water making debarkation from the catamaran very long with lines and time cut short to attempt to snorkel. Snorkeling wasn't anything to write home about. We saw one school of fish. Lunch on board was chaotic and the line that wound around the catamaran took about 20 minutes to stand in with people cutting in line, etc. standing in the hot sun and drink choices limited (water, regular coke and Fanta-no diet beverage options). The crew were not overly friendly. The highlight of the trip was at the end when they broke out the rum punch and American music (que Sweet Caroline) in an attempt to leave us on a good note. The strong rum punch did improve matters somewhat. All in all a very disappointing experience and turned out to be one of our least favorite days. We met others on the excursion that shared the same meh...disappointment. Sorry to be so down about it but feel that it's an honest assessment. 

[CRAZYCROSS]

Thank you for your honest review. We had this booked with Celebrity and im sure at the time of booking it said we had time to spend on Pigeon Island. However, i noticed that the Celebrity description now just says - a view of Pigeon Island. We have now cancelled and glad we did after reading your review.

[blue_water]

Yes from YouTube videos and other reviews we realized it’s just too darn crowded for us…Better options for sure…