Honeymoon Cruise

I always book through the cruise line for the reason you stated. Honestly what you are paying maybe $20 more for piece of mind?

Interested to see if others have booked through 3rd parties though as I'm also going on a cruise for my honeymoon (another thread going on right now).

Not going on a cruise for our honeymoon, but I have been on many. I almost always book through a third party for excursions and have never once had a problem of any kind. Not only do you save a little money, but because third party excursions are usually staffed by locals, in my opinion, it feels like you get a more authentic experience of the locale.

Like anything else, scour every website you can for reviews of the vendor. They, like anybody else in the service industry, rely heavily on those reviews for future business so they are going to do everything they can to make sure your experience is good. If you make sure you go with a company that is heavily and positively reviewed, you'll be just fine.

If anyone wants to share their ports of call, I can tell you if we had any experiences with third party vendors there

Thanks ladies! We will be stopping in Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Falmouth Jamaica.

I was looking at excursions through the cruise line and the choices are very limited, whereas the third party vendors at so many options and they were definitely more appealing.

Definitely just do your research and read reviews. You can absolutely get much better deals through a 3rd party. Check out cruisecritic.com forums if you haven't already. Tons of helpful information

I've done 3rd party excursions - BUT - here's the big caveat. If for some reason (usually bad weather) your ship can't dock at one of your ports, you will lose the money on a 3rd party excursion. If you book through the cruise line, they will refund you that money. So it's just about if you want to take risks.

We did a bunch of research and booked ours through IHG and saved a bunch. Best of luck!

Totally true, Rachel! When you get off the ship, there will be tons of vendors around trying to get you to go on their excursions. So if you want to just wing it, you will probably have lots of great options too!

Ooohhh, Cozumel! One of the best excursions I've ever done (this was November of 2014).

We used this company: http://www.toursplaza.com/eng/hiring-driver.cfm after reading so many rave reviews on Cruise Critic and other forums.

We told our driver exactly what we wanted to do - tour of a tequila factory, to see some ruins, and to go somewhere to get an authentic Mexican lunch.

IT WAS AMAZING. Such a great day (there were 6 of us- me, FH, my parents, my sister, and her husband). Our driver also said we had enough time to add a tour of a little shop where they make their own chocolate, so we agreed to that, and ended up sampling amazing chocolate and bringing some home with us. He took us to a local taco place for lunch where the whole menu was in Spanish and he translated with the server for us. Best food I've had in my life, and like $40 for all 7 of us (we paid for him) to eat. Add to that the tequila tour (where you get sooo many samples and also a margarita) and a tour of local ruins, and it was just one of the best days ever.

I could go on and on, but I can not recommend this excursion company enough.