Summers Travels

My first tip for your Alaskan adventure is to avoid AlaskaShoreExcursions.com. HORRIBLE customer service. There are a ton of companies you can go with and I’ll share what we experienced with the others, but this is one I’d avoid. We didn’t have a good experience with them and felt that their customer service response was basically, “We got your money so we don’t care”. You have choices, so I’d choose someone else.

One of the main things about this company that stood out-besides their bad customer service-is that we got a confirmation when we booked (more than 6 months before our cruise) and then never received anything else until we got a reminder email about 15 minutes after the excursion started. Once they have your money, they don’t care if you show or not and their communication was as bad as their customer service. Avoid is my advice on this one. They are a 3^rd party that takes your money and then books you with a company. In this case, Snowbird. I would just book with a company directly and not give this company my money. That way you choose (and read reviews) on the company you are going with and if there is a problem, you aren’t searching for who is going to help you (which is not them).

It is always smart to read reviews.

Many people say that if you are on a cruise, definitely book the excursions through the cruise line. We didn’t do that for our Alaska Trip and it all turned out fine. Cruise Lines have excursions for an inflated price. While many people say, well if something happens than the cruise ship will wait for you, and you could view that as an advantage for sure, but many companies have a guarantee to get you back to your ship on time or pay for you to catch up. When we booked we filled out the info on our cruise so they knew the itinerary. The places we booked with had this guarantee and as long as you plan accordingly you’ll be fine at a fraction of the cost. If your time off the boat is 7 hours and you book an excursion for 6.5 hours…then yes, consider booking with the cruise line. However if you are booking at 4 hour excursion, then you should be fine even if a flat tire, etc…occurs.

These companies are waiting for you at the dock. Holding signs and available to answer questions. We went to the wrong sign (same company-just different excursion). We were easily re-directed with zero issues and the staff were great about making sure that we got to the right person.

We printed out our confirmation emails for each activity and I put them in a folder for our trip. When we left the boat, I put the email in my purse so that if there were issues, we had the information handy. Don’t want to deal with paper copies? If your phone has access (my T Mobile was a bit spotty in Alaska) then you can simply create a folder in email titled “Alaska” (or any other trip you are doing) and move stuff to the folder to access if needed. With the confirmations are normally a description of where to go and things like “Our staff will be wearing bright orange”. It made things easy to find.

Bring Snacks. Alaska is remote and expensive. Snacks if you are taking a bus to a dog sledding excursion may come in handy. Same with bottled water. Also, hand sanitizer. Your touching busses, railings, etc that everyone else is touching. They did have some snacks for sale, but they were things like chips and candy bars. I saw a family with a gallon bag of packaged snacks and was envious of the trail mix and fruit snacks they had.