Delmar Sam

I just spoke yet again with a rather nasty agent at the NCL Shore Excursions Desk about the lack of additional excursions. Her basic message was that the excursions will be posted when they are ready to be posted and that I should just continue to be patient and keep checking the website. I tried to tell her that I was past being patient and that asking travelers to repeatedly check the cruise line's website was not a good look for the company, but she kept interrupting me to repeat her canned message. Look folks, it may well be true that NCL is exercising diligence in arranging responsible excursions and that all will be worked out well before cruising time. But it's also possible that either they are having difficulty in making excursion arrangements for this itinerary which could result in cancellation of some of the port calls or something more nefarious is going on that will not end happily for all of us. Either way, if I'm going to have to keep checking online in the hope of discovering that there are finally excursions posted, I'm also going to continue to let them know that they need to be straight with us. I hope you will too. The NCL Shore Excursions Desk can be reached at 866-625-1167. Be ready to provide your reservation number and the ship name and sailing date. Maybe you will be able to ask a question before you are interrupted.

Thank you for your positive thinking. It helps!

@3Sisters We haven't sailed through the canal before, but have traveled over land from Colon to Panama City on a cruise excursion. We have also visited Cartagena and have made 3 previous extended visits to Chile. This cruise will fill in many blanks along the way. We have chosen NCL only once previously, for a Hawaiian cruise almost 20 years ago. We picked it this time solely for the itinerary. All the other trans-canal cruises turned north with multiple stops in Mexico, not one of our favorite places to visit. I must say that I am not impressed so far. I have refrained from booking our own private tours so far for a couple of reasons - One of their touted benefits when we booked was a $50 credit per port for excursions booked through NCL. Of course, they have to offer excursions for this to be worth anything. Beyond that, I don't trust them to adhere to their published itinerary. It looks like they have been playing fast and loose on many future sailings. There are literally 207 ways that they try to nickel and dime passengers, even pre-sailing, all of them calculated to run up. I can't wait to see what they do once we are on board. I have to keep reminding myself that we picked this cruise for the itinerary and that it seems that many of the cruise lines are doing the same thing.

My wife and I are booked on the January 5, 2024 sailing of the Norwegian Sun, sailing through the Panama Canal from Miami to San Antonio, Chile. Although the cruise departs 6 months from tomorrow, NCL has posted only 15 excursions - all for the first couple of pre-canal ports. They haven’t added any since we booked in April. We’ve taken more than 35 cruises and never had this experience before. This is our first ocean cruise since the pandemic and only our second on NCL. Their agents claim that they don’t always have the excursions posted until 4 to 6 months before the cruise. Is this really typical for NCL or for cruise lines in general post-pandemic. Or is something more suspicious afoot, akin to all of NCL’s recent cruise and full cruise season cancellations and wholesale itinerary changes?