Most folks who go to the trouble of getting to a place as far off the beaten path as Alaska try to stick around for a while once they're there rather than jet home as soon as they hop off the boat. Knowing this, the cruise lines have set themselves up in the land-tour business as well, offering a number of great land-based excursions that can be tacked on to your cruise experience.
We're not just talking about an overnight stay in, say, Anchorage or Juneau before or after your cruise--any cruise line will arrange an extra night's hotel accommodations for you, but, enjoyable as that may be, it doesn't begin to hint at the real opportunities available in Alaska. No, the subject here is cruisetours, a total package with a cruise and a structured, prearranged, multiple-day land itinerary already programmed in--for instance, a 7-day cruise with a 5-day land package. There are any number of combinations between 9 and 21 days in length.
In this section, we'll discuss the various cruisetour itineraries that are available through the lines.
Cruisetour Itineraries
Many parts of inland Alaska can be visited on cruisetour programs--Denali National Park, Fairbanks, Nome, and Kotzebue included. If you've a mind to, you can even go all the way to the oil fields of the North Slope of Prudhoe Bay, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle.
There are three tour destination areas combinable with your Inside Passage or Gulf of Alaska cruise--two major ones, which we'll call the Anchorage/Denali/Fairbanks corridor and the Yukon Territory, and one less-traveled route that we'll call the Canadian Rockies Route, which is an option due to Vancouver's position as an Alaska cruise hub.
Anchorage/Denali/Fairbanks Cruisetour
A typical Anchorage/Denali/Fairbanks cruisetour package (we'll use Princess as an example, since it is heavily involved in the Denali sector) might include a 7-day Vancouver-Anchorage cruise, followed by 2 nights in Anchorage and a scenic ride in a private railcar into Denali National Park for 2 more nights at Princess's Denali Lodge or Mt. McKinley Lodge (or 1 night at each). On a clear day, the McKinley property, now in its fourth year, affords a panoramic view of the Alaska Mountain Range and its centerpiece, Mount McKinley, which, at 20,320 feet, is North America's highest peak.
A full day in the park allows guests to explore the staggeringly beautiful wilderness expanse and its wildlife before reboarding the train and heading into the Interior of Alaska, to Fairbanks, for a further 2 nights. Fairbanks itself isn't much to look at, but the activities available in outlying areas are fantastic, the Riverboat Discovery paddle-wheeler day cruise on the Chena and Tanana rivers and an excursion to a gold mine being highlights. Passengers on that particular cruisetour fly home from Fairbanks.
A shorter variation of that itinerary might be a cruise combined with an overnight (or 2-night) stay in Anchorage along with the Denali portion, perhaps with rail transportation into the park and motor coach back to Anchorage, skipping Fairbanks.
Yukon Territory Cruisetour
Another popular land itinerary offered along with Alaska cruises is the one that typically involves a 3- or 4-day cruise between Vancouver and Juneau/Skagway (you either join a 7-day sailing late or get off early), combined with a land program into the Klondike, in Canada's Yukon Territory, then through the Interior of Alaska to Anchorage. En route, passengers experience a variety of transportation modes, which may include rail, riverboat, motorcoach, and possibly air. There are a number of variations.
The Yukon, although located in Canada, is nevertheless an integral part of the overall Alaska cruisetour picture, due to its intimate ties to Alaska's gold rush history. The overnight stops are Whitehorse, the territorial capital, and Dawson City, a remote, picture-perfect gold rush town near where the gold was found. And if it's wilderness scenery you want, you'll be hard pressed to find any more awesome.
After heading north through the Yukon, cruisetour passengers cross the Alaska border near Beaver Creek, travel thence to Fairbanks, and from there go through Denali to Anchorage. Again, the tour can be taken in either direction and on a pre- or post-cruise basis.
Canadian Rockies Cruisetours
A Canadian Rockies tour is easily combinable with a Vancouver-originating (or terminating) Inside Passage or Gulf cruise. In 5-, 6-, or 7-day chunks, you can visit such scenic wonders as Banff, Lake Louise, and Jasper National Park in conjunction with an Alaska sailing.
The Canadian Rockies offer some of the finest mountain scenery on earth. It's not just that the glacier-carved mountains are astonishingly dramatic and beautiful; it's also that there are hundreds and hundreds of miles of this wonderful wilderness high country. Between them, Banff National Park and Jasper National Park preserve much of this mountain beauty. Other national and provincial parks make accessible other vast and equally spectacular regions of the Rockies, as well as portions of the nearby Columbia and Selkirk mountain ranges. The beautiful Lake Louise, colored deep green from its mineral content, is located 35 miles north of Banff.
Before or After?
Though the land portion of both the Denali and the Yukon itineraries can be taken either before or after the cruise, we feel that it's better to take the land portion pre-cruise rather than post-cruise. Why? After several days of traveling around in the wilderness, it's nice to be able to get aboard a ship to relax and be pampered for a while.
That, at any rate, is the conventional wisdom, and there's more of a demand for pre-cruise land packages than for post-cruise. Since obviously the lines can't always accommodate everybody on a land itinerary before the cruise (they're hoping to even out the traffic flow by having a like number of requests to go touring after the voyage), it's smart to get your bid in early.
Battle of the Top Players
If we talk in this section more about Princess and Holland America than we do about other lines, it's because they, by dint of investing tens of millions of dollars in land tourism, have become the 800-pound gorillas duking it out for dominance in Alaska. Other lines offer some of the same cruisetours as these two, but many of them buy at least some of their cruisetour components from Princess and/or Holland America's land operations. It may seem odd to have companies buying from (or selling to) competitors, but with tourism in Alaska, there's practically no other way. As recently as the 1980s, when Holland America-Westours owned the bulk of the land-tour components, Princess, its number-one rival, was also its number-one customer! Hey, a 4-month season makes for strange bedfellows.
It was to carve out a niche for itself and to lessen its reliance on the services of a competitor that Princess plunged heavily in the lodging and transportation sectors. Princess is arguably stronger in the Denali corridor than any other line, while Holland America clearly has the upper hand in the Yukon/Klondike market. But each line offers both tour areas in its portfolio.
Princess owns railcars (called the Midnight Sun Express) in the Denali corridor. Holland America also owns railcars there; it calls them the McKinley Explorer. Both, incidentally, rely on the Alaska Railroad to pull them. Princess owns wilderness lodges; Holland America owns city hotels. Princess has a fleet of motorcoaches; so does Holland America, including a number of wonderfully comfortable, double-length Alaska Yukon Explorer flexi-vehicles with a cozy lounge at the rear for snacking and schmoozing.
Royal Caribbean also entered the fray this year, introducing its very own cruisetour operation (for both the Royal Caribbean and Celebrity brands) and hoping to become the third dominant player in the market.