Tortola Island Tour Port Adventure

[carolina_yankee]

Anyone have experience with this? Considering this or just grabbing a taxi tour at the port. The Adventure includes a stop at Cane Garden Bay. We'd like to visit the rum distillery nearby so wonder if there is time. We were also considering possibility of a late breakfast or early lunch at CGB, which would mean getting a taxi back on our own. Do the Disney tours frown on you leaving a tour if you let them know so they aren't waiting for you? Apparently the island taxis are used to people doing that. Another advantage is that we wouldn't need to start moving so early in the morning if we did it ourselves with a local taxi.

My only hesitation about a random taxi tour is the opportunity for photo stops is likely to be better on the Port Adventure. Plus, Disney probably arranges the better taxi companies as their vendor, anyway. If anyone has done an island tour on your own, would welcome feedback on that.

It's a small island and CGB has plenty of taxis for return, which we'd be doing at least four hours before all-aboard, so I'm not worried about missing-the-ship issues.

So, the conundrum is essentially "confined to Disney schedule" or more flexible timing with possible less quality experience.

Dirk

 

[Shanti]

Anyone have experience with this? Considering this or just grabbing a taxi tour at the port. The Adventure includes a stop at Cane Garden Bay. My only hesitation about a random taxi tour is the opportunity for photo stops is likely to be better on the Port Adventure. Plus, Disney probably arranges the better taxi companies as their vendor, anyway. If anyone has done an island tour on your own, would welcome feedback on that.

We did this excursion and it was miserable for us. DCL does not use "better taxi companies" at all- there is no difference between their contracted excursion drivers and any other taxi drivers in the Virgin Islands. The taxis are the same. There is a lot of waiting involved in any excursion, and don't expect anyone from the cruise ship to accompany you. At the port, they hand you over to the island excursion group. During our excursion, for some reason our entire set of excursion group drivers (there were multiple buses) were misinformed about which excursion it was, so we spent a lot of time being taken on the wrong excursion without realizing it (both excursions began with an island tour, which is why none of the guests noticed at first). When they finally started dropping people off at a run-down shopping center instead of Cane Garden Bay, guests started speaking up that our excursion was the "Beach Break" with an hour promised at Cane Garden Bay, & was not a shopping trip. The drivers hadn't even noticed that everyone was carrying towels & beach bags... They argued at first, but the multiple busloads of guests complaining together finally made them realize that it was their company's mistake & they'd taken us on the wrong tour. So we finally got to Cane Garden Bay (quite late) and were returned to the ship much later than scheduled.

Cane Garden Bay itself was fine, but nothing spectacular. It's clean with nice water and sand, but it is no gorgeous deserted island beach. It's a typically touristy Caribbean beach with lots of umbrella chairs for rent and an unappealing restaurant on the beach.

Take a taxi. You'll save a lot of time, and probably have a better experience. We certainly had a better experience the next day, when we took a taxi to the beach on St. Thomas.