Last night I was looking into shore excursions for our spring break cruise. I was on both the Norwegian site, and the site of Shoretrips a third-party shore excursion business recommended by our travel agent. We used Shoretrips in Alaska, and every excursion was top-notch.
On the Shoretrips site, I can choose my cruise, and there is a really useful left-side menu with each of the ports, then for each port the excursions are grouped by type of experience. I also appreciate that the port arrival and departure times are clearly displayed on the left-side menu, so that I can determine if I’m comfortable with the length of an excursion.
On Norwegian, on the other hand, the left-side menu is a general menu of every extra they want me to consider on my cruise. When you go to shore excursions, they’re sorted by “Relevance.” Relevance to what? To what Norwegian wants me to buy?
Navigating around the Norwegian site is difficult, too. I should mention that lower down, in the “Filter By” section, there is a listing of the different ports, with no arrival and departure times or dates. Just the number of the day of the cruise, from 1 to 8. And when you Filter By the port you want, it only displays three excursions at a time, to save room to sell you beverage packages and the like down below.
Dear Norwegian: if I was considering beverage upgrades, I would not be doing it in the Shore Excursions pages of your web site. I’m not a marketer, and this probably works overall, but to me it’s just an annoyance.
The real thing that left me asking, “Why?” is the listing of cabana and villa rentals. Call me crazy, but $699 per person for a villa seems ridiculous.
But wait! Once you click on the link, it explains.
This, of course, is halfway down the page and not that easy to spot. It’s your web site, Norwegian. Why not change your listing page to say “Cabanas from $XXX?” Or, better yet, “$XXX per day?” I feel like they’re leaving money on the table for those who don’t bother to click.
I haven’t had much better experiences with other cruise web sites, and I just wonder why they would choose to cut corners there. Do people forget about the lousy experience once they get on the ship? Is planning the trip important enough to everyone that they muddle through it anyway? I suppose that’s probably it, but I don’t have to like it.
And I’m booking most of our excursions through Shore Trips.