For many travelers port days and time off the ship matters just as much as the the ship. You can have the best cabin, the best dining, the best service onboard but if you waste your time ashore on overpriced, overcrowded excursions, it drags down the entire cruise. Cruise lines make excursions easy. They also make them expensive, rigid, and often painfully generic. That’s why experienced cruisers increasingly book independently. Travelers are often getting off the ship and hiring their own drivers, reaching out to local companies or using Viator . One of the tools I’ve been recommending more often lately is Project Expedition’s cruise shore excursion search , because it’s actually built for cruise passengers, not retrofitted for them. The Core Problem with Cruise Line Excursions Cruise line tours exist for one reason: control. They’re designed to move large numbers of people efficiently and get everyone back to the ship on time.…