I mentioned in an earlier post that I had built a spreadsheet to track lots of things related to this long voyage. One of those things was to assess what shore excursions we wanted to take. Our goal was to see as much different culture, wildlife, and natural beauty as possible.
Viking regularly provides one shore excursion per port as part of the cost of the cruise. These are generally walking or bus tours of the historical and architectural buildings in the town or city. And the rest of the time in port can be spent wandering around, shopping, or paying for additional excursions.
The additional excursions per port vary wildly by price and availability. A cooking lesson in someone’s house may not be overly costly, but perhaps only 12 people (out of 950 onboard) can go. Other excursions may be able to handle hundreds of people, but be quite expensive. And there is everything in between.
Viking, like the other cruise lines, set priorities on when you can book your excursions. The date when you can start booking tours is printed on every receipt and is listed on all the promotional material on the Viking website. Viking uses room categories for their prioritization. Other cruise lines may use a combination of room category and some kind of loyalty credit. But no matter which way a cruise line prioritizes booking of shore excursions, if you are not prepared to make your choices very early on the first day of your booking opportunity, you may lose out on options. Even the included tours must be booked as soon as you can so you can choose the time you want to go.
An excursion with limited capacity may already be full before your booking date. Still, if you are not ready very early on your first booking day, you will never know if there had been some openings, and you missed out because of your own inaction. On one cruise, we missed out on an included tour because I didn’t realize I needed to book it.
On this cruise, the additional excursion my husband wanted the most was a particular safari in Africa. So when our day came, the first thing I booked was that safari. I went back later that morning to look at the safari again, and there was a notice on it — SOLD OUT. It took us a few days to work through the 128 days of the cruise and book all the included tours and the additional excursions we were willing to pay for.
Taking a tour all the way up to the Christ, the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro was another high priority for us, and I booked it very early. That tour never showed up SOLD OUT because Viking was able to get enough buses and tour guides to accommodate hundreds of people. An excursion I wanted on the Falkland Islands I also booked early, and I didn’t find out until yesterday that it sold out shortly as well.
People we have met on the cruise have asked how we managed to get on some of these limited capacity tours. All I can say is we had the spreadsheet with all our decisions, and I got up very early on the first day we were allowed to book excursions and worked through them in our priority order as fast as I could. If I had gone in the calendar order, I probably would have lost out on that safari.
