Selecting Excursions for Our Cruise

For the last several months, I have been researching possible tour options for our Viking Homelands-British Isles Explorer cruise. I have read Rick Steve’s Scandinavian and Northern European Cruise Ports for an overview of each port and scoured hundreds of posts on Cruise Critic for recommendations on specific tours.

Viking offers one included shore excursion in each port, usually an overview tour by bus or a walking tour. Quite a few optional paid excursions are also available. My Viking Journey is Viking’s web portal that allows passengers to create an account, manage documents, and view and book shore excursions for each cruise. When the final list of excursions became available on My Viking Journey last month, I began to narrow my focus to our top choices.

My Viking Journey

The window for booking excursions for our cruise opened on March 14. After learning how quickly excursions sell out, Tim and I were at the computer at the appointed hour and were able to select quite a few of our preferred tours. Some were already sold out by then, however.

Over the next week, we kept checking back and found that some tours had become available, so we quickly booked those. We went through quite a bit of booking and cancelling and rebooking this week. Unfortunately, a few of the tours I really wanted never opened up. We also knew that we could make changes while we were on the ship.

During my research, I also learned about independent Norway in a Nutshell tours. That tour was tops on my list, and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how we could take one of those tours while we were docked in Bergen. A full-day, round-trip tour would work with our schedule, so I also booked that one.

Norway in a Nutshell

We will probably continue to make changes, but the majority of our shore excursions are booked.