Welcome to the Royal Grand Blog Podcast or we can look into the world of Royal Caribbean Cruising.

I'm Harold's Matt Hochberg and this is episode number 560.

I'm doing something very different this year when I go to Europe.

It's not my first time in Europe, but I'm planning it differently and I wanted to share with you my insight and tips for how to plan a European cruise vacation and the shore excursions that come with it.

Here we go.

I'm headed to Europe on a Royal Korean blog group cruise out of Southampton, England, going on an eight-night northern European cruise.

I am so excited for this cruise.

It's a group cruise.

I'm going with my friends.

My family's joining me for it.

And it'll be their first time in

Europe. And it's an idea I haven't done before. So it's like every checkbox I think a lot of

people look for in a cruise as to why they would book one. And for this one, I'm really excited for it.

But when I was planning this cruise, I realized almost early on, I was about to make a big mistake with how I was planning it, because I think I was really planning this cruise, the same way I planned my Caribbean cruises.

And it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't be doing it.

So what I mean by this is, you know, we're going to ports like Rotterdam, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Hamburg.

And we're actually staying on for the next sailing, which is going to be a seven-night

Norwegian fjured sailing because we're already there and it's a totally different itinerary.

But when I was planning this cruise, I was doing it kind of the same way I used to do it in the

past work.

You know, I would start booking Royal Caribbean excursions. And it was kind of interesting because for a while there were no

excursions or like, then they were like two and then Royal added some more, but they sold out

...