Alaska On A Budget

Cruising Alaska On a Budget: How To Save (a lot of) Money By Planning Your Own Port Excursions

August 7, 2018
Homer Alaska on a budget cruise
It’s day seven of a 14-day cruise, and I’m sitting in the on-board cafe with a grande chai latte and my MacBook. Because there’s only so much vacationing I can do before I need a desk chair and a full-sized keyboard.

 

Seriously. I have issues.

 

Which is part of why I’ve chosen to use this trip not only as an opportunity to relax, unwind, and unplug, but as an opportunity to create some more terrible video content for you, dear readers.

 

You’re welcome.

 

In the coming days and weeks, I will be publishing five posts featuring both afore mentioned terrible video content along with my more traditional words-and-images blog posts surrounding a theme: how to do an Alaska cruise on a budget.

 

Alaska is a notoriously pricey destination. Even if you can find an inexpensive sailing on a standard cruise ship (as we did) excursions in Alaska can more than double the cost of the trip. Don’t believe me? Please allow me to prove this to you using math! Because I am insane, I sat down with the excursion guide provided by the cruise line (Holland America) at the beginning of our trip. And I did math. Here’s that math:

 

Alaska Cruise excursion cost budget Holland America cruise excursions

 

Let’s dive in to these numbers, shall we? I realize you may not be going to all of these ports, so first consider that the average of the averages is $175. Also know that these excursions prices are PER PERSON. So if you are traveling in a party of four, you are looking at spending $700 per port day JUST ON EXCURSIONS. This does not include the cost of the cruise, the cost of travel, or the cost of anything else you’d do in port each day (it is important to note that the average length of a cruise excursions is 4.25 hours; the average port stop length in Alaska is 10 hours, at least on our sailing.)

 

Kinda makes going to Disney World seem like a bargain, eh?

 

Additionally, given the above averages, if we had spent the average amount of money per excursion in each port stop, we would have spent a little over $1,225 per person on excursions during our cruise. That would in fact have doubled the per-person cost of our trip (though remember, we spent 14 days in an inside cabin, so our overall cruise cost was already on the low end.)

 

Finally, also keep in mind that these are averages. Depending upon what you want to do, it is entirely possible to spend far more than the average on excursions (it is also possible to spend less, provided all you want to do in each port is go to a cheesy lumberjack show or take a short trolley ride. But we are focused on maximizing fun, so we won’t be doing any of those things.)

 

Are you enjoying my math? Because I will be providing these numbers—in even greater detail—at the beginning of each individual port post to serve as a comparison between what we could have done (and spent) and what we did do (and spent). All of which will be accompanied by afore-mentioned terrible video content of us doing the things.

 

You’re welcome. And I’m sorry.

 

So sit back, relax, pour yourself your own hot beverage, and settle in. It’s a 14 day cruise. That’s a lot of terrible video content.

 

Please note: the purpose of this series is to illustrate how it is possible to do an Alaska cruise independent of expensive cruise ship excursions. This in no way implies that these expensive excursions are not worthy of your time or money. There are things we would have loved to do—a floatplane trip for my husband and the dogsledding on a glacier excursion for me—that we just could not afford. But after 14 days we both agree: at no point did we feel like we were missing out on anything just because we were on a budget. It is my hope to help others plan a similarly rewarding trip. Happy sailing!

 

Disclosure statement: no one sponsored this trip. No one sponsored the ‘gear’ I’m using to create this content. I paid for the trip myself and it is my own tech (and by ‘tech’ I mean ‘I shot all of the video on my iPhone’.) So if you’d like to see better quality video content—please give me money so I can buy better gear. And if you’d like overall better content, please give me enough money so I can do this for a living instead of during stolen moments surrounding paid work I must do so that I can eat and pay the mortgage. Thanks!