How can you find cheaper cruise shore excursions? — featuring Tips For Travellers

0:00 One of the biggest costs you'll face when you're on a cruise is excursions. I'm Gary Bembridge of Tips For Travellers and I'm going to tell you in this video how you can actually go on fantastic excursions and not spend as much money. Well the first thing I recommend you do is research, research, research. Make

0:16 sure that you understand what is available in every port. It's very easy to do that. You can obviously look at the Cruise Line excursions, because they will have little booklets or you can look online and understand the sort of things that you can do and the range of things that you can do. Secondly, of

0:31 course, look at blogs or other online cruise sites - things like Cruise Critic and there's obviously blogs, even like my own Tips For Travellers, which will cover many many ports. You can basically search online and look for port guides. Of course you can watch many videos as many great video tours of

0:47 destinations and excursions and ports. So basically find out what is available and the range of things to do. The second thing that I recommend you do is understand how busy the port is likely to be. If you find that you're going to a port where there's five or six ships there could be 15,000 to 20,000 people

1:06 there, and so that may influence what you actually want to do because there will be a lot of people going on all the popular trips. So how do you know how many ships are going to be in any one place at any one time? The good news is there's a website that tells you just that, and the website is called CruiseTimetables

1:22 and and the great thing about that website is you basically put in the port, you put in the day you're going to be there, and it will tell you what ships are there and how many people those ships are likely to have on board. It gives you a great sense of how busy a port is going to be and will help

1:38 you decide what you want to do that particular day. The third thing, of course, is then to go through that list of cruise line excursions and decide which of those that you really want to do - and no matter what - those are the ones you want to do. Doing that process you'll decide the things that you really want

1:52 to do, so my fourth tip is then to look at alternatives. There are many alternatives to the cruise line excursions. There are companies that specifically develop tours and excursions similar to those that are offered by the cruise lines and often many more alternatives to the ones

2:10 offered by the cruise lines. Some of those sites are ShoreFox.com, ShoreTrips.com, CruisingExcursions.com and ShoreExcursionsGroup.com So there's a number of sites that basically will put together for every itinerary and every port alternatives to Cruise Line excursions and the great thing about looking at those sites is you'll find other

2:35 people have posted photographs, sometimes videos and reviews of the different excursions. What's great about those sites is you basically put in the name of your ship and your dates it will bring up your itinerary, every single port and then you can go through port by port and it will tell you what

2:50 excursions are available for your specific ship, on that specific day, in that specific port. You will find as many of the excursions are similar and tend to have slightly smaller groups, and are usually much cheaper. My next tip is to look at private guides. There's a whole range from

3:08 relatively inexpensive ones through to very expensive ones. One great alternative, which tends to be relatively inexpensive, are local tour guides and you can find those through a site called toursbylocals.com . You could go in there and take a look at the port you're calling on and you will often find a

3:25 relatively inexpensive local guide. Or you can look on things like Cruise Critic where you'll find especially in the roll call for your particular cruise, people will be looking for people who want to combine together and you can find a guide for three of you. four of you maybe up to six of you - you can share one guide.

3:42 One of the great alternatives, and probably the least expensive of all of your options, is to use a hop-on hop-off bus. These are a great alternative. Hop on Hop-off buses are in pretty much every port that you will call on. These buses will take you to all of the main sites in the particular port. They

4:01 will be relatively inexpensive and what also happens, which is great, is hop-on hop-off of buses will either have a stop at the place where your ship docks or the cruise port, or if ships are in on that day they add an extra stop because they see this is a big business opportunity. Hop-on hop-off of buses are

4:18 great. They're inexpensive, you'll have commentary in multiple languages, it will take you to all of the places that you want to go to, all the critical places, and obviously hopping off you can spend as much or as little time. It gives you an overview through the commentary of the history.

4:32 You know the significant things that you're going to be seeing and it's a great great alternative. That is probably the best and most cost-effective way of sight seeing. Of course you can go out self touring yourself but the great thing about hop-on hop-off bus is it combines self touring but with all that

4:47 great commentary, information and you don't have to worry as someone has curated it - and the great thing is because it will come back to the cruise port you can just check the times and make sure that you're back in plenty of time for the ship. Cruise excursions can cost a lot of money. It can be many hundreds of

5:00 dollars added on to your vacation cost. So hopefully that's given you some alternative ways and given you more confidence to look at options and alternatives to Cruise Line excursions. If you liked the video I'd love it if you gave it a "like", but even more importantly please subscribe to Tips For Travellers and

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