Meme9

[Meme9]

what to do for 4 hours after disembarking in Vancouver 

[CCRUZER]

We are taking a City Highlights tour with Land/Sea Tours and they will drop you off at the airport when the tour concludes. You might look in to it to see if it fit your itinerary.

[cruiseryyc]

What time is your flight out and where is it headed?  You might not have four free hours to do a tour.

[martincath]

Agree with CYYC - more info needed, and 4 hours may not be how much time you have available...

 

To maximise the number of cruisers who can take their tours, indy tour providers generally start the shorter city tours from the pier at 10am (while you could be on the sidewalk well before 8am if you self-disembark). Even cruiseline sponsored tours won't start before 9am at the earliest, and then of course will also wait around for the last persons to get their bags through customs etc. unless there's enough demand to run more than one bus.

 

Then there's the whole 'what is best for me may not be even close to what is best for you' aspect - even if you do have four full hours, since that's barely enough to do one large local attraction justice and the only way you could fit in two small ones is if they are conveniently-close together, you really need to figure out what would be the single best thing for YOU to do in Vancouver. We've got the full gamut of beautiful landscapes/parks/gardens (wild, somewhat-tamed, and totally-man-made options abound - even within the city limits you have choices), mountains and beaches, museums of multiple types, art galleries, etc. etc. etc.

 

Unless you know that you share the same tastes as another poster who recommends the thing they enjoyed most (and also know that they also did some research to figure out that the thing they did actually was actually the best thing they could have done) you're wasting the opportunity to have the best possible experience. At the very least, go check TripAdvisor to see what thousands of folks enjoyed - all the popular sites have enough reviews that you can assume they are a pretty accurate comparative ranking of Joe Q Public's opinion - and hopefully you know yourselves well enough to have an idea how your own tastes differ from Joes.

 

In short, even with only 4 hours there's a lot of stuff you could do - but winnowing it down to your best option really does mean you need to either supply us randos on the internet with very thorough details of your taste, budget, and exact time frame or doing more research yourself...

 

[Meme9]

Thank you so much for your comments. Our Flight from Vancouver to Chicago is 15:55 in June. It doesn’t seem like we (up to 12) can qualify for any tour since we need to be at airport 13:55 (2 hrs ahead according to Air Canada). Then there’s the issue of luggage if there’s a short tour that could be picked up outside cruise terminal. Sounds like we’re in for a long boring wait in an airport...:-(

Suggestions appreciated. 
 

[martincath]

2 hours preflight is sensible, especially as a group of 12 is unlikely to all hold Global Entry/NEXUS cards (which speed you through both Security and Immigration, so you can safely push arrival to the 60min mark which is the cutoff for checking bags).

 

Cruiseline 'tour and transfers' would work perfectly for the timing - they tend to start 9am ish and drop you at YVR by 1:30pm - but they are simply horrendous value, gouging you in both billing in USD instead of CAD and generally also bumping up the number of dollars (a 4 hour indy tour runs about CAD$80, whereas a cruiseline will happily charge you $99, even $129 USD per person). But check your online cruise personalizer just in case there's a sale.

 

With 12 people though, I'd be shocked if you could not spend much less than this on a custom private tour - start by contacting WestCoast and LandSea, who are the two biggest players in the local tour market, to ask how much a 9am pickup in a 16 pax minibus (ample room for all your bags) to take in their standard 4 hour city tour then drop you at YVR would cost. LandSea do so many of these I've given you the link direct to their 'private charter for post-cruise touring' page!

 

[Meme9]

Thank you, martincath, for your ideas and especially your links! I will definitely check them out and do some research now that you’ve given me a glimmer of hope that we CAN actually DO something! I have already nosed around TripAdvisor briefly. Thanks again for your help!