We had a great experience on an Atlantic crossing on the Riviera a few years ago so when we found a Panama Canal cruise with oceana with el Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba on the itinerary, we signed up. During our safety drill, before even leaving port in San Francisco, we were told that because of hurricane, we will be skipping Cabo’s, El Salvador and Nicaragua, substituting instead San Diego, all for our safety. We can understand substituting San Diego for Cabo’s, but El Salvador and Nicaragua were 9 and 10 days later, with hurricane heading north while we are heading south. Deciding to chuck those ports at that time seemed premature.

Sure enough, two days later, the coast was clear, but we were told it was too late to reinstate the original itinerary. Despite the fact that we still had a week to go before originally scheduled dates of arrival. And as though this was not enough, and despite the three extra sea days, we arrived five hours late in Costa Rica so any meaningful tours were cancelled. Instead, we took a tour called Scenis Costa Rica with half of the tour in the dark since the sun sets there at 5:30. Four excursion were included free on this cruise so Oceana saved a nice tidy sum with all these changes, just on abandoned shore excursions alone.

It doesn’t matter how good the food or services were when ports of call get jettisoned so opportunistically! If we just wanted sea days, we would have taken a much less expensive repositioning cruise. Read more