Earliest time to book tour

[BrytEydBelle]

First time cruiser here....I want to book an island tour with Captain Marvins. I am trying to book as early as possible so that we have ample beach/shopping time afterwords. I will be on Carnival Freedom, a large ship so I know tendering may take a while, especially if I am not doing a Carnival tour. The time listed for the Cayman Islands is 7-4. The first tour with Captain Marvins is at 9:00. Do you think I would have enough time to tender to shore and make the tour?

 

I apologize as this probably is a dumb question to more avid cruisers, but this is our only stop where we are booking a tour with an independent company, so I want to make sure I do it right. Thanks in advance!

[sunluva7]

You have 2 hours before you have to meet Captain Marvin, so you should be fine. As long as there are no delays and you get on the earliest tender possible, you should be okay. When we cruised in 2003 on Carnival, we missed our non-ship excursion in Belize.:( Our ship didn't arrive in port until 9:00, and our tour was at 10:00. Back then, Carnival had a policy of getting the ship's excursion passengers off first. Everyone else who wanted to get off on the first tender was told to arrive at an appointed place to get in line for a tender ticket at 9:00 a.m., that they would hand them out not a moment sooner. Well, when I went to pick up our tickets, expecting a line at 8:40 a.m., the first tender tix were already gone, so we had to settle for the second. Needless to say, I was a little upset they handed them out earlier than they stated.:( We didn't arrive to the dock area until 10:30, and missed our excursion (to their credit, they waited until 10:15 for us, and later refunded our money). Nowadays, I'm a little extra cautious when I book non-ship tours.;)

[klo28910]

Actually it will depend on what time zone you are sailing out of and if your ship is staying on ship time are switching to shore time. On our cruise 2 years ago, the ship switched to shore time at every port. But when we went to Cayman (eastern) out of Galveston (central) this Dec., we had booked the 9am excursion with Captain Marvin because we were set to arrive at 7am. A week before the cruise, someone from Captain Marvins called and told us that they had been notified that the ship would be staying on central time which would be 8am shore time so we had to move our excursion to a later time. I would call or email Captain Marvin's...they are very helpful and will be able to help you decide what works best for you. We have used them twice and loved it both times!

[Tayana Freedom 45]

We were on the Valor last year and did a tour with Captain Marvin which was terrific. The ship stayed on "ships time" which was eastern time since it sailed from Miami. So when it was 9 on the ship it was 8 on Grand Cayman. We ended up getting ashore too early for our excursion since I was anxious about the tendering process and am not the greatest with time zone differences. We had no problem with the tendering. Did not get a tendering ticket. We just went down to the tendering deck and got in line. There were plenty of tenders and the whole operation went very quick. We were there in September and there were only 2 or 3 cruise ships in port which may explain why my experience was different than the experience of others. Hope this helps and have a great time.