We just returned from our second Mediterranean Oceania Cruise. This is a smaller cruise line and caters to adults, mostly couples, with interesting travel itineraries and "to die for" cuisine. Their pricing includes airfare, and there is no extra charge for soft drinks or dining in their private restaurants. Other than their private restaurants, there is no fixed dining time and it is your choice to dine with others or not. (Casinos, bars, on-board shopping, entertainment/shows and shipboard activities are not a big interest to us and not a huge focus of this ship line. They do have gourmet cooking classes aboard their two larger ships.) The rooms are very comfortable and in the very good to luxury level.
Our idea of a great trip is to spend a few days exploring the starting city and a couple at the finish city. We prefer cruising so that we don't have to haul our luggage from place to place. Our first cruise with Oceania, last year, was from Rome to Barcelona (with Portofino, Livorno (Florence/Pisa/Tuscany), Monte Carlo, Marseille (Provence), Majorca between). This year, we went from Istanbul to Lisbon (with Izmir (Ephesus), Santorini, Valletta Malta, Trapani Sicily, Majorca, Cartegena, Malaga between). We like that Oceania mixes up and doesn't repeat their itineraries over and over and will book with them again in the future, as we have a long bucket list of places to explore. You can also extend your cruise as the next set of ports is likely to be entirely different, so you can go for as little time as a week all the way up to half a year. In the future, we plan do some longer trips and to also explore river cruising, to get us to the inland spots on our list.
We used Cruisingexcursions.com to book excursion packages that follow the itinerary of the ship. (This was way less expensive than the offerings from the ship.) During the first cruise, this was wonderful and we felt like we were having private tours in each port city. We were never more than 6-7 people and were able to move quicker than the giant buses taking our fellow cruise ship passengers to the same places, plus, the smaller vehicles could get us closer to the venues in some of the small towns we visited. During the second cruise, Cruisingexcursions.com cancelled half of the package right before the trip as they hadn't gotten the number of tourist passengers needed in certain cities, as a minimum. We complained about this, (to no avail), but quickly found that most of the cities we visited had inexpensive hop-on, hop-off (HOHO) tours readily available and we took advantage of these to see the sights of the cities and determine, (time permitting), if we wanted to stop and explore a spot in more depth. This worked very well in our first and last cities (of the cruises) and we supplemented the HOHO bus with an explore of public transportation (buses, trams, streetcars, and metros (subways) systems. (We rarely ever had to take a taxi, but we like to use public transport.) Our observations are that you can stay on the HOHO bus for a leisurely tour, or, to do Europe well, you need to be able to walk great distances that aren't always flat and smooth. Most European cities do not have the same accessibility that you see in the US.
The free maps that are provided by the HOHO buses are really valuable identifying most all the sights that you might want to see in a particular city and you can also find these on-line before you travel. They help you get the layout of the city and better plan your activities and timing.
Pricing is on the cruise line and cruising excursion websites. We also saved a little money purchasing our HOHO bus tours in the first and last cities on Viator.com.
With the current exchange rate, there couldn't be a better time to travel. We found the biggest bang for our buck in Turkey, as they are not on the Euro, but Euro countries quite reasonable as well. Happy traveling!
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