How do you find independent shore excursions for cruises? — featuring ParoDeeJay

0:04 Hey guys, it's Jay and welcome to another quick tips episode, which of course is a quick video that's going to give you some tips. Now, one thing we get asked a lot is how do we find shore excursions in ports of call that we are going to? So, I thought that might make an interesting video is to document the

0:22 process after we book a cruise, what goes through our brains and what websites do we use to plan shore excursions? A lot of these we do have affiliate links for, so we will include those where applicable, but honestly, the first thing we do a lot of times is go to the cruise line's website and pull

0:39 up the shore excursions. And that kind of gives us an idea of what there is to do in any given town, especially if it's a new place we haven't been. But, that's boring. So, let's get into the independent excursion side of things. All right, let's jump over to the computer. Now, my favorite tool by

0:56 far is Shore Excursions Group. Why is that? Because they have Well, you can see one of our cruises is actually filled in here already. But, you go to this easy little engine. It has a ton of cruise lines. You pick that, it gives you all of the ships, and it gives you all of the itinerary. So, this is already punched

1:13 in for our Circle Pacific that we have coming up. You just hit search, and it gives you Well, there's specials on the right-hand side, but you've got ports, every little port that has an orange button has excursions. So, and the good thing about them, too, is they have the return to ship

1:31 guarantee. Got to put that in there because a lot of people are like, "Oh, they love having that guarantee." Apparently, Shore Excursions Group mentions that they will cover the cost of getting you to your next port should you not make it back. So, I don't think a lot of people miss their their things

1:44 cuz they wouldn't be wanting to, you know, put out that expense, I'm sure. Let's come down to Oh, let's go to Papeete and see what we can do. So, we have a Tahitian sunset cruise, scuba adventures. Okay, so see, some of the ports you're going to have a little bit more limited times than others. If

2:02 you jump back up here to something like Oh, let's say Puerto Vallarta. Oh, there we go. Now, we just have pages and pages and pages. And if you go all the way to the bottom, usually, you'll find some private tour options cuz most of these are going to be small group options. Favorite tool. This is literally one of

2:21 the first places I run to every time we book a cruise. And of course, the affiliate link. Editing me is taking care of all those captions as we go. So, that's stop number one, typically. We also have Viator. So, let's jump over to their website. This is good for specifically if you want to look up a

2:41 particular area on a particular date. So, let's just say we wanted to look up Puerto Vallarta. There it is. Oh, you can even put cruise port. Let's just pick regular Puerto Vallarta. Uh we're just going to put I don't remember remember what date we're going to be there. Let's just go for the

2:56 28th of January, shall we? Click the search, and up come tons and tons and tons of tours. Um you can just click in here. You've got all sorts of reviews you can read, pictures, and it even gives you uh suggestions for other excursions sometimes. So, lots of information, very handy to find

3:19 independent uh tours. So, these mostly act as third-party vendors, you know, as a sort of a middleman between you and the independent vendor. Uh TripAdvisor, of course, is another good one. This is just a like if we're planning maybe not a solid tour, but we just want to know what to see and do in

3:37 an area. Let's just Oh, actually, you know what? Let's stick with Puerto Vallarta, shall we? And uh we'll go ahead and jump to the things to do category cuz you can look at restaurants and specific categories, but this is uh and this actually does list tours on here as well. I usually

3:53 scroll down Taco Tasting. Uh top attractions in Puerto Vallarta. So, see, you've got the Malecon, Zona Romantica, and you just keep going and going and going, but that's mostly we use this for ideas of things to see. And then you can hit see all and expand that a little more. Couple of things that we like to use if

4:12 we just kind of want to hang out somewhere for the day, of course, you've got resort for a day. Uh you can look up here under destinations and see a whole gaggle of places that you can uh use this site for. We actually don't have an affiliate link for this one, but D can book this through her travel agency. So,

4:29 even if you're already booked on a cruise, get a hold of her, she can get you set up somewhere. This one actually lets you put in a specific uh cruise line and ship, too. Let's just poke something in here. Uh there we go. There's there, 7 nights. Uh where can we go for with our day

4:45 passes? I guess we can go to St. Thomas. Nice, there we go. And it gives you listings of places that you can go. Some of them all-inclusive, some not, but about options there. Uh Resort Pass is another one. We've got an affiliate link for them. Uh let's see if we want to go to Oh,

5:07 they give you a bunch of suggested cities. Sure, let's go to Fort Lauderdale. Why not? On the Halloween. And so, this should, if you hit the search button, obviously, pop up. There we go. A bunch of places that you can get day passes for. Again, they've got some all-inclusive options

5:25 and some non-all-inclusive options. So, that's the main two that we use for beachy day pass type of things. Sometimes we just want to get out and have a nice guided walking tour, be it a gratuity-based or one that takes a has a small fee associated. Free Tours by Foot, great resource that

5:42 we have used before. They've got a ton of cities that they service. We've used them in London. I think we even used them for our tour that we did. I'd have to look up and see. We've done some in Tenerife, all kinds of places. You've also got GuruWalk, which if you search up some of

5:57 their cities, that's usually gratuity-based types of things and sometimes self-guided. And GPS My City, this one has a nice app associated with it. These are self-guided walking tours, but they come up and give you all the hotspots, easiest ways to get there, tell you about what you're seeing.

6:15 Excellent. And then, the last place for us, but potentially the most important and helpful place in the history of the universe, is going to be the ParoDeejay website. Oh my gosh. If you go right here, well, see, we've got search by ship, but the one I'm more excited about is search by port. If you

6:36 click this, this will take you off. You have an alphabetical list of every port we have ever visited and vlogged, and it just goes on and on, and you can see Let's just go to Where are we going to stop? Cabo, there we go. So, Cabo, we have done whale watching, and you can click there and

6:54 watch the video. We have explored the port, went to Cabo Wabo. There we go. We did a day at Solmar, so that is a very useful tool as well. I had to, of course, throw in that little shameless self-promotion. But, in a nutshell, that is the thought process that goes into choosing excursions and things. Like I said, we

7:12 always typically start at the beginning of this list and kind of make our way down it in that order, but a lot of fun to be had at these sites. So, hopefully, this gave you some insight into how to find independent things to do while you're cruising around or possibly even on land

7:30 vacations, and you enjoyed this episode. If you have not already, be sure to subscribe to our channel, become a Paroomaniac today. Socialize all our media, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And until next time, rock on. [Music] [Music]