Vacation time and money is precious - and no one wants to waste it.  Sometimes, however, it’s not easy to know what decisions are best for your budget.  Do you buy the cheaper phone charger, or the one that costs more because you expect it to last longer?  Do you book a shore excursion through the cruise line, or do you ‘risk it’ and go with a third party?  I can’t guarantee that the gas-station phone charger you bought for $7 will last, but I can explain why booking a shore excursion outside of the cruise line is probably not nearly the risk you think it is and why you won't be a 'pier-runner'.

How Often Cruisers Really Miss the Ship (the pier-runner myth)

I looked into the data, aaaand…I came up empty.  Still, I have a good sense for how often someone doesn’t show up to their ship on time in a port of call and is left behind.  It must be a lot, right?  I mean, TikTok is full of videos showing 'pier-runners' - cruisers sprinting toward the ship after all-aboard time, devastated as they watch their ship sail away without them.  Wrong!  See, the videos of the many thousands of people NOT messing the ship, they just don’t do well.  

I do have a way of measuring, albeit not at all scientifically.  When someone isn’t onboard by sail-away time, unless the officers know about it (they called or otherwise made their situation known), the cruise line pages those guests by name.  If you’ve ever been on a cruise and just before leaving port you heard, “Mr Albert and Misses Linda Thompson from deck 6, please contact guest services at extension 1034”, well guess what, unless they weren’t properly scanned on when returning to port (possible, but not common), the Thompson family is late, and unless they turn up real quickly, they’re going to have a very bad day.  While I’m sure the rate of late guests varies by destination, cruise line, and other factors, I’d say that in the Caribbean, on contemporary and premium lines, I probably hear this somewhere around once per cruise (sometimes much more, and sometimes not at all).  If I’m on Wonder of the Seas with around 6,000 guests, stopping at three ports, two out of 18,000 disembarking guests is not bad.  Also, sometimes, those guests getting paged may turn up before the gangway is pulled.

Also anecdotally, out of hundreds of cruises I’ve been on, I don’t recall meeting anyone who has missed a ship (on a previous cruise, of course...it's hard to join someone in the ship's hot tub if they're busy on shore finding an embassy).  It may have happened - don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not common.  I do know two people who missed a cruise ship: my father and his friend, in Haiti, in the 1970s.  That, however, is a story I’ll ask him to write up some time.

That’s Why Some People only Book Ship Sponsored Tours - and Why They’re Wrong

I’ve been on ship sponsored excursions that have returned late - so late, in fact, that we got back after the all-aboard time.  Each time that has happened I hear other guests say, “that’s why I only book through the cruise line - we’d have missed the ship!”  This stems from two ideas that are both reasonable, but a bit flawed.  The first is the idea that the cruise line will never leave behind guests on one of their excursions - that this is part of the benefit of booking with them.  

While it’s true the cruise lines generally offer a guarantee that does have to do with returning from excursions, they’re actually guaranteeing that if you don’t make it back to the ship before it leaves, they’ll get you to the ship as soon as they can and handle the logistics.  This could mean waiting, but it could mean helping you fly to meet the ship at the next port…or at the end of the cruise.  To be clear, that is not nothing, and most of the time, in practice, it means the ship will wait for you, since that’s usually cheaper for the cruise line and a much better guest experience than learning what Belize City’s Philip S.W. Goldson International Airport’s snack bar is like - but it can go either way.

In case you’re pretty sure that the guarantee says they’ll wait for you, here’s the fine print from Royal Caribbean’s terms and conditions, as an example:

The other flaw in booking cruise line tours for this reason is that the tour almost certainly wouldn’t have returned late if it wasn’t coordinating with the cruise line.  The operator of a catamaran, bus tour, or otherwise knows if things might run behind long before pulling up to the port, and if they’re working with the cruise line they may choose to contact the ship to see if a late return is acceptable.  If it’s not, they may cut things a bit short to ensure an on time return.  Those tour companies sometimes have that flexibility - which is great.  This also means, however, if it’s a tour that isn’t in coordination with the cruise line, they’re going to work really hard to get back in time, which gets us to another point.

Why Some Guests Miss the Ship

In most cases, these guests went off on their own and either failed to ask about and account for local traffic or other considerations, didn’t keep track of time, or (and this is a big one), didn’t pay attention to the ship time vs the local time.  There are a lot of things that can go wrong for any of us on any day - so I can’t cover all circumstances: medical emergencies or other unforeseeable circumstances can certainly be a cause where there really isn’t blame to be had.  Not paying attention to the announcements about time, drinking too much and passing out at a Senior Frogs, however, is often pretty preventable.  

So why aren't the people on third party tours missing the ship?  Well, if you’re a business that exists to profit by taking cruisers on tours, there’s one thing that would tank your business pretty quickly: not getting those cruisers back to the ship on time.  You can bet they work real hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.  Some even guarantee your return as a part of their business (sound familiar?), and I promise you that’s not a guarantee they’re eager to live up to.  

How to Book Excursions/Tours

If you’re thinking, “okay, so how should I book?” there is good news - you have a ton of options.  For one, there’s nothing wrong with cruise line excursions.  I often book excursions through the cruise line for their convenience.  While they often come at a premium compared to third parties, they don’t always - once in a while I actually get a better price from the cruise line, or I might have shore excursion credits that offset the cost (for example, with NCL’s Free @ Sea program).

Before booking through the cruise line though, I always check a few different sites, and I generally recommend others do the same. Most, like Viator.com or ProjectExpedition.com are marketplaces - they’re not giant tour companies, they’re just operating a marketplace where those companies can advertise, where guests can post reviews, and where they can offer a level of confidence in the legitimacy of the business by handling the payment and other logistics.  In some of my videos you’ll notice I share links to the site or tour companies I use in case they’re interesting to you (in some cases using those links helps support the site, by the way, but in other cases, they’re just plain links).

There is one other way to get great advice on tours - and that’s to leverage the help of your travel agent.  A good travel agent can often make recommendations based on their personal experiences, and they might even be able to save you money on a tour, or get you booked with one that is otherwise sold out.  Good agents are relationship managers (as well as plate-spinners, trip-planners, and more).

Ending this Tour

So what is the takeaway?  Well, hopefully it’s that you have more options than you think - even if you want to be really careful about not missing the ship.  Know why?  No one wants you to miss that ship.  So feel free to explore options for a variety of companies in port.  If they’re running a business showing cruisers around, they don’t want you to miss the ship any more than you do - and they have local knowledge to help prevent it.  if you’re heading off on your own, note the local vs ship time, ask port officials or police officers for tips on local traffic or other concerns, and finally, take a picture of the ship’s or port agent’s emergency number (usually on your key card or in the daily program) so that if something does happen, you can give them a heads up.