Alaska excursions - Afraid of non-DCL options

I purchased all my excursions for my second DCL Alaska cruise through tour operators. I only booked with places that guaranteed to pay for any incurred costs of I missed my ship (it's the same guarantee that DCL offers). On the train ride excursion in Skagway, I was assigned the same train car as those who booked via DCL. We all had the exact same trip except I paid a lot less.
 
This—and plane or elevator excursion I would do via disney. Ground transit is more reliable, but weather is such an issue in alaska and I did hear on these boards of an incident where a helicopter couldn’t get back safely to the port due to sudden weather, and then the guest had to scramble to find transport to get them to the next port to meet the ship the next day, which was not easy due to lack of roads in Alaska

True. But even the Yukon highway can experience accidents and landslides that shut down the roads for hours. The large trucks on that road are seriously frightening. But, we still took the calculated risk and booked with Chilkoot. They have a very good reputation. I wasn't too worried.
 
Thank you so much everyone for weighing in with great advice/suggestions! I super appreciate it! We are going in July, so I will just pray the weather cooperates!
 


Hello amazing Disboard gang! I need some help with Alaska excursions! It will be our first (and likely only) trip to Alaska. We have researched a TON on the excursions through Disney and have some ideas of what we'd like to do. I have some questions, and also wondering if non-DCL would be better. However, I must admit - I am super afraid of non-DCL options. I'm not sure why... maybe its because I am afraid we will miss the boat? Anyway, looking forward to your advice!

Skagway - We'd like to do the glacier/dog sled adventure here. The ones in Juneau look amazing, but we decided to do it at this port since we really want to focus on orcas (my favorite animal) in Juneau. We are pretty set on the dog sledding and glacier flightseeing for $739. Is there a better option for us? Additionally, we'd really like to also do one of the horseback adventures. Either day or sunset - is it possible to do sled dogs and horseback in the same day?

Juneau - all we know is WE WANT TO SEE ORCAS. A lot of the adventures seem to be pretty much the same - a few guarantee you will see a "whale", which I realize could be humpback instead. Does anyone have a recommendation for the best orca viewing experience?

Can someone "talk me off the ledge" with my fear of non-DCL? Am I crazy for wanting to avoid these? We are going in July, so we still have plenty of time to research. Looking forward to your advice and help!!

Orcas - if you want to see Orcas, as others have said, do it in Vancouver. I would get there 2 days early and use the day beforehand to go see Orcas. There are resident and transient Orcas. Every morning, boats go out in the morning to see if they can see them. Sometimes, ferries will also radio in sightings. From then on, all the tourist boats share information for the day. In Alaska, you're more likely to see humpbacks than Orcas. In Vancouver, you're more likely to see Orcas than humpbacks. On some of them you can see their success rates in seeing Orcas (which is really really high). Needless to say, in Vancouver, we used a non-DCL tour and it was fine. In fact, we used the same one again before our second Alaska cruise.

Skagway - doubt you'll miss the boat if you do helicopter with non-DCL. It's a really small town and the heliports are generally close to the terminals.
 
Alaska is easy to book on your own. The ports are very close to the city centers so in most cases you can just walk right off the ship and be where you want to be. We did all of ours independently with no problems.

When we did the Mediterranean cruise however we did two of our three excursions with Disney for reasons you mentioned because the ports were over an hour away from the city centers.

We saw whales off the side of the ship a couple of times sailing to and from Alaska so that was free and serendipitous.

I don’t know how old your kids are but with the dogsledding one, it may be a good idea to not tell them about it in advance and then surprise them the day of. That way if it gets canceled they’ll never know.
 
I understand the fear of not booking an officially sanctioned DCL excursion, but for me, it was easier to step outside of my comfort zone in Alaska because I was in the US … not operating in a place where I didn't speak the language nor was I concerned with the safety of the excursions or areas I was visiting. We booked 2 tours on our own and did two with DCL in Alaska. For us it was just a matter of wanting something not available with DCL (mainly a smaller group size … all the people on our non-DCL excursions wound up being DCL guests). For the common tours that I investigated, the price differences didn't seem to be all that great between DCL and independent.
 


I purchased all my excursions for my second DCL Alaska cruise through tour operators. I only booked with places that guaranteed to pay for any incurred costs of I missed my ship (it's the same guarantee that DCL offers). On the train ride excursion in Skagway, I was assigned the same train car as those who booked via DCL. We all had the exact same trip except I paid a lot less.
which tour operators did you choose from?
 
We've done tntours98 in Skagway twice and both excursions were incredible. Highly suggest them. It's a husband/wife team that does small minibus trips.
 
We did the Alaska cruise last September, and every single one of our porch adventures was not through Disney cruise line
But
Was the same adventures as booked through Disney cruise line

What I mean is I chose what I wanted to do on the Disney cruise line and then I searched on the net and did my research and found the companies I wanted to do that a lot other people did and when I picked them 50 to 80% of the people in my group were from the ship.
The funny one is we did an Alaska crabbing adventure and for this one there we say 40 groups and 38 where are official Disney cruisers, and two groups, including us we’re from the ship. Lol
Because of this, the official Disney cruisers had special lunches and special stuff because it was an official Disney outing, but they gave it to us anyway because we had the lanyards from the ship we were from the ship they’re like oh what the heck
Lol so we lucked out for that. For the other 2 ports 50% were from the ship and on official cruise and about 25 to 30% were from the ship like us doing our own thing and maybe some other vacationers from other ships
 

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