"preferential" tendering on Mercury?

[Robrph]

cruising on Mercury in two weeks along the California coast. Does Celebrity give first tender tickets to those using their excursions? Found this to be the case on Summit last year, and found it to be very annoying. As one who arranges his own shore trips, I don't appreciate being one of the last off the ship just because I didn't buy Celebrity excursions.

 

Rob

[Desertbelle]

I have never been on a cruise line that didn't do this. I agree, those of us who plan our own excursions shouldn't have to wait, but it's one of the reasons to book excursions through the ship. You get off the ship fast and you don't miss the ship at the end of the day no matter what happens to the excursion.

 

With few exceptions, every ship I have cruised on has gotten people off the ship very quickly. The difference between those with "priority tendering" and those without seems to be only 30 minutes or so.

[garykool81]

My experience has also been that as long as you do not want to get off the ship literally at the moment the gangway goes down, you can easily board a tender within just a few minutes.

 

I've only experienced long waits for tenders when I have tried to get off the ship within the first 30 minutes or so after the walkway is lowered.

 

But, as the previous poster pointed out, priority tendering is one of the perks of booking directly through the cruise lines.

[Karynanne]

I was wondering...when returning to catch the tender, why isn't there "priority boarding"? Seems to me it should work in both directions.

 

Karyn

[mhenry]

We always book our own excursions because it is so much cheaper than booking through the ship. We have never had a problem getting priority tendering by just going to the Purser's Office the night before and explaining that we had an early private excursion.

[Ine]

Last year we had a very long wait for tenders going to and also from P. Vallarta.

 

We have been waiting for more than 1 hour!!! On the way back we had to stand in long lines in the sun.....

 

In Cabo going from the ship there were large local-tenders, that made it much quicker.,

[snakg4]

We were on the Norwegian Dream. We had booked our own excursion. We were waiting at the Gangway. The crew sent us up to a lounge (where the cruise line excursions were waiting) We talked to the crew member in charge and they let us board with the first tender.

 

Ken