Taking a crew member on an excursion?

[swedish weave]

DW and I have taken crew members on tours a few times. The incidents came up in conversations about the ports, and some expressed an interest, so we responded by asking if they would like to do a short tour.

 

We have arranged with their supervisor to get them off a little early so they would have a couple of hours free time if they really would like to go outside.

 

Some of you need to know that the crew members are not all cut from the same mold. They are individuals and have different likes and dislikes. We are friendly to all of the crew mmbers, so they become like family after a few cruises.

 

It is fun for us and for them when we can enjoy the antics of the "kids" and buy them a souvenier or beer or snacks while they are with us.

 

The tours we do with the "kids" are not booked through the ship, but we do them onshore or by taxi. It is not pre-planned, but sort of a spur of the moment type of thing.

Edited June 7, 2015 by swedish weave

[dickinson]

It seems to me that you would need to do a private tour and not ship excursions. Only way I can see doing a ship excursion is if you are already on the ship and have not only seen the excursion has room but you have also checked with the crew member and you all work it out at the excursion desk. A problem even with this is that if there is any chance the excursion will sell out then all the seats should be reserved for guests and not crew. Does not matter if they are paying full price or not. Guests have booked the cruise and should have access to the excursions before crew.

 

I think the issue with most people's responses is that they have never done this and are offering their opinion. What you really need is info from people who have actually done it. You got at least one response from someone who has and they did it privately.

 

I think it is nice that you want to do this. Let us know how it worked out.

Edited June 7, 2015 by dickinson

[notentirelynormal]

He's married. He's been doing this 30+ years. He asked for us to sit down with him and share some of our cruise photos with us. He seemed generally interested in seeing our photos from our April/May cruise, and asked us to stay in touch. He's not flirting with us. He enjoys photography and seeing Alaska.

 

Every cruise we go on we take a photo album that has previous cruises of crew. Some of the pictures are over 20 years old. The crew goes nuts for them. Like seeing your cousin when you were both 5 years old. Our Med cruise I asked our head waiter if he had seen the photo album. Are you kidding! he says. The M'D made copies and the entire dining room crew has seen them. Off to the purser's desk. They page the head of housekeeping. OMG! They took the book. A couple of hours later the book was returned along with chocolate strawberries.

 

We had a crew member that we knew for over 20 years. He was married but that didn't mean he didn't like spending time with our family. He even came to our house to visit.