Speaking of Norway

[goldendesign]

Our family trip is about 90% finalized. Five days in London, staying right near Buckingham Palace, and trying to hit as much as we can with the full 3.5 days we can. Then onto a 14-day Norwegian Fjords tour. 

We usually self-book a lot of our excursions as the tours handled by the cruise lines tend to be too singular in purpose or prohibitively expensive. An example of this is last year in Alaska, a helicopter ride to a glacier was $700 per person via cruise. It was a ride to the Glacier and a 30 min walk around they called a "hike". We self-booked through an adventure charter and paid about $400 per, helicoptered to the glacier basin, guided hike and climb to the main plateau, over a mile traversing the glacier fields, then on to a sled-dog camp where they hitched teams up and rode us up further and then back to the helicopter landing. Overall 4-5 hours and was worth every penny.

So this year, doing much the same. But sometimes, Norwegian to English translations don't always work. I booked a trip while in Olden in January, and just now was looking at the actual receipt and saw that instead of selecting the age of my daughter, 6, I paid for 6 kids' tickets! Emailed them today and they happily adjusted the price all while laughing saying "We figured you were just a very productive family."

[shootingstar]

Take some pics for us!

[Razors Edge ★]

6 minutes ago, goldendesign said:

So this year, doing much the same. But sometimes, Norwegian to English translations don't always work. I booked a trip while in Olden in January, and just now was looking at the actual receipt and saw that instead of selecting the age of my daughter, 6, I paid for 6 kids' tickets! Emailed them today and they happily adjusted the price all while laughing saying "We figured you were just a very productive family."

I ran into an address field mapping loop that took me a bit to get around.  It wanted - seemingly - street address and then street number, but that didn't play well with my CC verification, so I had to try a few permutations of address to finally get there. The was no error message - just transaction canceled/declined several times, so then back to select, click, click, etc. to try again.

What I have found with Alaska and Norway is the port towns are often so small that it's a pretty symbiotic relationship (good and bad) between the cruise lines and the excursion folks, so that most excursion outfits end up maxed out just from satisfying pre-booked cruisers.  We mixed it up a bit in Alaska, but it really was a "sellers" market for the most part.  Luckily, the internet is always opening up more ways to find your own options, but it is also opening up those options for folks in "competition" for the same thing. 

[goldendesign]

1 minute ago, Razors Edge said:

What I have found with Alaska and Norway is the port towns are often so small that it's a pretty symbiotic relationship

You're quite right. One town we will be in in Norway has a population of 280 people. We'll be there when it's just us in port but some days they have 3 (3!?!?!) cruise ships in port. That can easily be 6k people, astounding how the logistics work for things like this.

I've found that Norway has less of a "Company-owned" town concept than Alaska, and we've had more freedom in booking and getting unique combinations too. 

[BuffJim]

Taking all six of your kids on this trip is ambitious and courageous!

[Razors Edge ★]

1 minute ago, BuffJim said:

Taking all six of your kids on this trip is ambitious and courageous!

That screams DISNEY cruise to me.  Dump them with Dumbo and pick them up a week later when the cruise ends.