It all started with Bill’s Valentine’s gift.
Bill adores reruns of old Godfather films for some reason. Me, not so much. Bleeding dying bodies riddled with bullets give me nightmares.
Bill’s my guy, though, so in the spirit of love I presented him with a homemade gift certificate for a cruise shore excursion. When our cruise ship docked in the port city of Catania, Sicily, we’d visit the iconic Godfather filming sites in person. Great gift, right?
Only one problem: I didn’t actually book the tour in February: Lots of time before our September cruise, I thought. When I tried to book the tour in July, oops: Booked solid. Uh oh. My procrastination paid off, though, because without it we might never have met Chris and Lisa, or a raft of other fantastic people since then. We met our new friends on Cruise Critic Roll Call, which is where I solved my procrastination problem and saved cash to boot.
Cruise Critic Roll Call: What is it, and how do you access it?
Most cruisers know about Cruise Critic, a massive site where travellers research cruise ships and itineraries, and read reviews. Not everyone knows about the Roll Call community, however, which is hosted on the Cruise Critic site. 
Cruise Critic lets cruisers set up a dedicated thread for their cruise; usually one of the early bookers sets it up. You can view a cruise roll call without signing up, but once you join, the roll call becomes your personalized advance planning team.
What can you do there?
Cruisers ask questions about everything, as well as set up private shore excursions and plan onboard activities. The folks on our upcoming transpacific cruise roll call, for instance, are busy setting up mahjongg and knitting groups right now. (The ocean crossing takes two weeks, and I just may need to learn how to play mah-jongg or knit, in case I run out of books to read). You also might find tickets to see the pope if you’re lucky (really!). This is what it looks like.
Roll Callers ask for and give tons of advice. There is always someone who knows the answer to your question, or knows someone else who knows. I’ve been asked more than once for advice about Vancouver, B.C, since I live in Seattle. And even though Vancouver, B.C. is in another country, I knew the answers and was thrilled to help.
What type of people will you meet there?
Before I faced the Godfather problem, I only accessed the main site to obsessively read reviews in pursuit of the perfect cabin. I looked at the Roll Call pages but found them clunky, and didn’t know whether I could trust anyone there.
Since then, I’ve learned that 1) yes, navigation is clunky (get on it Cruise Critic techies) and 2) the people I’ve met there are helpful, reliable, and just plain wonderful! I’m sure a shady character shows up once in awhile, but so far I haven’t met one.
So what about shore excursions?
When I finally joined my Mediterranean cruise’s roll call two months before sailing, I found that fellow roll callers had already set up two small-group Godfather tours, both full. Yet I still had to deliver on Bill’s Valentine’s gift. So what to do? Well, I figured out how to set up my own tour by observing how other roll callers did it, and asking questions.
Mission accomplished! Valentine’s Day was saved. I arranged an excursion with the tour company Sicily With Sebastian, and I was so proud of myself I threw caution to the wind and arranged another Amalfi Coast excursion with AP Tours. Both tour agencies came highly recommended online, and they more than delivered. Bill got to drink a Limoncello at Bar Vitelli, and walk down the same street Michael Corleone and Apollonia did after their wedding ceremony. A Valentine’s bonus for the Padre who loves old people and dead stuff: Mummified monks and abbots encased in glass, decaying away for all to see, in a crypt under the sixth-century Capuchins Monastery. I’m not kidding. Bill loved it.
So that’s how we met Lisa and Chris, who joined both of our tours. We hit it off right away. (Of course we did! We were a padre-cop-therapist-educator team on vacation.) We had so much fun, in fact, we joined up after the cruise to wander the streets of Venice together, and we still keep in touch.
YES, BUT……
If you’re thinking of taking on the work of organizing private tours, here are some things to consider:
First, it helps if you love organizing things. (Former administrators do very well.) And it helps if you have a Padre, who took over money management, which I loathe. Leaders of Roll Call small-group tours arrange meeting locations on board, collect money (which usually isn’t due until the actual day of the tour), and serve as conduits between the tour company and the group.
I confess that during my first go at this, I had nightmares that people who signed up for my tours wouldn’t show. But no worries; they always showed up. The Roll Call crowd on the whole is a very trustworthy group.
Language barriers might cause small problems, even though foreign tour companies are upping their online game to tap into the burgeoning cruise trade. So far, it hasn’t been a problem for us. Recently I’ve set up tours with locals in Hong Kong, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and so far it’s been beyond easy (and I can’t read a word of Chinese or Japanese, trust me).
Also make sure you abide by the cruise line’s policies. Cruise Critic provides an onboard meet-and-mingle party for your roll call, but cruise lines ban discussion of private tours there. They don’t take kindly to cruisers planning shore excursions, since it’s competition for their own ship tours. We take the ship tours sometimes, but they tend to involve unwieldy, tour-bussed sized groups and cost a pretty penny.
One more caution: On private tours, participants do not have the ship’s guarantee that they will get back to the ship before sailaway. That said, we’ve never come close to missing the boat, and because their livelihood depends on it, private tour companies make darn sure you’re back safe and sound before the gangplank goes up.
So Cruise Critic’s Roll Call is now an indispensable tool in our journey-planning toolkit. And we can’t wait to actually meet all these folks we’ve met online, in person, once we’re aboard.
And who knows? Maybe some of them will become our lifelong travel friends. That’s about the best treasure we could possibly bring home from our latest journey.