Newbie question about WS excursions

[GottaKnowWhen]

I am not new to cruising but most of my experience has been with Celebrity (and a couple trips with Royal). We have done several different types of ship excursions (i.e., foodie tours with the chef, transportation only "on your own" excursions, guided excursions to local sights...), we have often booked private or small group excursions through local operators, and we have often gone ashore and walked around, with maybe a taxi ride or cable car sidetrip thrown in.

 

For a variety of reasons we somehow have managed to have scheduled three trips on Windstar in 2022, over 5 weeks total. As I try to think about planning for those, I am totally baffled by the excursion situation. Yes, I have seen the threads about the excessive cost and about the unpredictability of next year's requirements to only use ship excursions or not. Setting all of that aside, assuming that I will have a choice of what to do and assuming that I will be able to pay what it takes, that leaves me with a basic question: what is a Windstar excursion like? Is the experience likely to be similar to what I would expect from Celebrity or any other cruise line? Or does WS stick with smaller groups, more carefully screened guides, ... In short, is the Windstar shore experience  different/better in any way than with any other company?

 

Stan

[honumaui]

Can't compare with Celebrity as we haven't been on any "big" ships since 2010, but all our experiences on Windstar have been very positive both in Alaska and East coast/Canada.

[Heartfelttraveler]

We usually take ship tours due to the large amount of OBC we receive. Yes, we do sometimes book our own private excursions or rent a car.  I am only addressing the fact that we have taken ship excursions on several cruise lines.

 

On our Windstar Wind Spirit cruise from Barcelona to Rome the excursions were all small group.  And we had a representative from Windstar on each excursion with us that spoke several languages - English, French, Spanish and German.

 

It is just my opinion but I find the Windstar excursions to be very well priced with a lot of attention to details.

 

Also, you have the convenience of getting on a tender when you need to if you are on a Ship tour.

 

 

[Oldsweets]

We have done a number of cruises with Windstar and like everything else with cruising it varies from ship to ship and time period to time period.   We cruise a lot with a number of different cruise lines and we can say that the very best excursion we have ever been was on Windstar and strangely enough the worst was on another Windstar Cruise.  Our best was a small location that had very few excursion choices and no options for an outside agency and our worst was also a small location with again few choices and no option except for Windstar.   I know this doesn’t help much but sadly its realty.