Should I call it a disembarkation tour or a debark tour or a debacle tour? This was the question I pondered before writing this account of the final part of our 2023 Ruby Princess cruise from California to Florida via the Panama Canal.
After two days crossing the Caribbean Sea we sadly awoke to the fact that we’d reached Florida. Sad because it was the end of the cruise, and sad because it was Florida which is right down the bottom of the list of US states we ever wanted to actually visit, although since neither of us had before it was at least handy to say that we had, even if thankfully briefly.
Ends of cruises are never good but this one stands out as being worse than most we’ve experienced.
With an early evening flight from Miami airport we’d arranged to take an excursion first before being dropped off at the airport, and of the couple of choices available we opted for the airboat ride on the Florida Everglades, home to alligators. The first issue came immediately after getting off the ship, picking up our luggage, and heading to where we needed to meet the bus that would be taking us on our debark tour. The meeting spot was exposed and it was very hot and sunny this early in the morning. Not a problem if there’s a bus to get on but there wasn’t, and ours didn’t turn up for close to half an hour.
Upon arriving at Everglades Holiday Park we then discovered that for one of our tour group’s passengers the bus was completely unsuitable for him. He’d had assistance to get on the bus by officials at the port, but getting him off and into his wheelchair at the park required several of us fellow passengers helping to carry and support him. Undignified for him, legally shaky for everyone else involved. This was a tour advertised as suitable for wheelchairs, and that will get another mention soon.
We were there for the two experiences of riding on an airboat and seeing alligators, and we weren’t the only ones with plenty of other groups present. Our guide assured us that we were in the queued slots and when a boat became available we’d be called forward but in the meantime we had some opportunity to try to hunt down any bit of shade we could and look out for the famed wildlife of the area. Birds, there were plenty, and we spotted a turtle while another passenger had an encounter with a dragonfly that looked a little the worse for wear, but no alligators yet, and time kept ticking while other groups set off on their noisy boat rides then school children turned up and were bumped ahead of everyone into the next set of boats and people started muttering about just how long this was all taking. The plan had been for an airboat ride then a show where alligators and other animals were shown off so someone asked if we could do the show first since it was taking so long. “No, don’t worry, there will still be time afterwards,” our guide assured us all.
Finally, we got the nod that we could head down to the boarding area and we all did so. You can see the sort of airboats that are used for these cruise debark tours below; large, flat, with benches spread across. It would turn out that getting reasonable views was fine because the boat wasn’t overfilled with passengers, instead spreading them out so a couple could sit on one side of a bench and a couple could sit on another.
Well, most couples. To get into the airboat you had to step off the wooden jetty and down into the space between the benches, ducking your head to avoid the scaffolding framework around. You need to have some mobility to do this and people in wheelchairs who’ve needed to be carried off a bus don’t have enough. Not only that, but the cramped conditions and just common sense levels of safety stopped any of us from being able to help the poor guy in. For him, this wheelchair-accessible debark tour was a complete waste of time and money. A terrible situation for Princess Cruises to allow to happen.
Our boat driver introduced himself to muted replies from a group of passengers increasingly disappointed with how the tour was going and then explained that since he’d been told he needed to get us back by a certain time he’d have to change the planned hour-long airboat ride and give us the express version at less than half that duration. The groans were loud.
We started to move out slowly and during this I took some photos, including one of this building you see in the picture below. I like industrial buildings. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that on the grass in front of the building, above the cormorant with its wings spread out, there is an alligator enjoying the sunshine in very much the same way we weren’t.
That alligator would turn out to be the only alligator we saw on this tour and we hadn’t even realised it at the time. The express excursion involved a few examples of several minutes of rapid airboat-thundering across long stretches of water – which was actually very nice, particularly because the cooling breeze was very welcome – followed by several drifting periods around known alligator hang-out areas. The sort of areas that alligators could usually be found during the cooler parts of the early part of the day or a bit later but not, as it turned out, right at this particular, quite hot time we were out on the water, it being close to an hour and a half later than we’d initially expected.
The plant-life in the Everglades was fairly interesting and there were some nice reflections around groups of trees, as you can see below, but this tour had not really been advertised as “See grass up close” and all attempts by our airboat driver to get some group interactions going fell on disappointed ears.
You can’t guarantee wildlife sightings, of course, but it was impossible not to think that better organisation, a bus on time, and no wasted time and effort helping someone when this should all have been catered for by the tour group, and we might have got on the ride earlier, had the full time allotted to us, and increased our chances of seeing alligators in the wild. We’d have had longer out in the Florida Everglades on the water and not standing around in the searing sunshine at the very least. Most of us, anyway.
At least we had the show to watch now. Only we didn’t because the current show was in progress and full and we didn’t have time to wait around for the next one. At this point there were some angry comments from some passengers demanding their money back (that wasn’t going to happen) and saying they’d be complaining to Princess about it (and I hope they did because we certainly did afterwards, albeit to no effect). Princess Cruises are usually quite good at responding to issues like this but on this occasion they completely dropped the ball.
Our guide took us around the back of the show and we briefly glimpsed an alligator, some rabbits, and some tortoises, but that was it.
To hammer the final nail into this coffin containing an absolute shambles of a cruise debark tour we came within a whisker of not being dropped off at our airport terminal because our hapless guide decided to stop using the microphone to announce where the bus was. It was only when I spotted what looked like the Virgin Atlantic logo near where we were briefly stopped that I had to shout down the bus to find out why we were where we were and realised that we needed to get off.
The airport and flight home were, thankfully, unremarkable, although we were treated to a lovely sunset from our seat window as we bid a very fond farewell to Florida.
And that concludes the travelogues for this cruise.
The DJ aboard the ship was appalling and we hope he never works for a cruise line again, and this debark tour was remarkable just in how bad it was, but those are really the only low points to mention. Managers and bar staff on the ship were otherwise superb and we’d meet many of them again a year later on another cruise, and it was lovely to tick off another of the Grand-class ships operated by Princess. Highlights of experiences off the ship were, of course, transiting the Panama Canal, having a great time on our excursion in Cabo San Lucas, flying in a day early for the first time, and getting to visit Colombia for the first time too.
Ugh, don’t get me started about Florida. The sad part is that there are, or used to be prior to climate change, a wondrous array of wildlife to see and lovely beaches. Now, it’s an overcrowded, polluted , badly-run shithole sinking into the water. Let the poor birds and gators have what’s left of it. Sorry to hear that your tour sucked, but ripoffs are more plentiful in FL than gators these days.