Do Carnival Shore Excursion Prices Ever Drop?
Wait for the price to drop is standard advice on Carnival excursions. Five months of daily checks say the drop depends almost entirely on where your ship is going.
"Wait for the price to drop" is the standard reply in every Carnival excursion thread. We checked 2,766 Carnival tours every day for five months — 314,870 price checks across 166 ports — and 2,184 of them have listed at exactly one price the entire time.
Of the ones that did move, more went up than down. We logged 421 price increases against 280 decreases since April 14.
The useful part is not the headline number, though. It is that the odds depend almost entirely on which ocean your ship is in.
Quick Answer — Do Carnival Excursion Prices Drop?
TL;DR| Where you're sailing | Tours tracked | Share that ever got cheaper |
|---|---|---|
| Caribbean, Bahamas & Mexico | 1,306 | 3.1% |
| Alaska & Canada | 281 | 3.9% |
| Europe & Mediterranean | 792 | 20.2% |
| Asia-Pacific | 219 | 26.5% |
| US homeports & Hawaii | 168 | 0.6% |
- Most tours never move. 2,184 of 2,766 Carnival excursions held one price across 150 days of daily checks.
- Hikes outnumber cuts. We logged 421 price increases against 280 decreases since April 14.
- The port decides, not the price tag. A Mediterranean tour was six times more likely to get cheaper than a Caribbean one.
- Cuts arrive in batches. Two thirds of all cuts landed on three or more tours in the same port on the same day.
Most Carnival Excursions Have One Price and Keep It
Seventy-nine percent of the catalog has not changed price once since April.
Carnival's pre-cruise excursion storefront behaves much more like a printed catalog than a live market. A tour goes up at one price and mostly stays there.
| Carnival excursions, Apr 14 – Sep 15, 2026 | Figure |
|---|---|
| Tours tracked | 2,766 across 166 ports |
| Price checks | 314,870 over 150 days |
| Held exactly one price | 2,184 (79%) |
| Changed price at least once | 582 (21%) |
| Price cuts | 280 |
| Price hikes | 421 |
| Typical cut | -13% (about $20) |
| Typical hike | +7% (about $10) |
Read the cut and hike rows together and the asymmetry shows up. Increases are more frequent, decreases are roughly twice as deep — so the catalog drifts up in small steps and occasionally resets down in a large one.
Only 271 tours have ever been marked down at all. That is under 10% of everything Carnival sells online, across a window covering the entire summer season.
It is a milder version of what we found in Carnival's drink and Wi-Fi packages, which did not move at all. Excursions are the one Carnival add-on with a pulse — it is just a slow one.
Where You Sail Decides Whether You'll Ever See a Cut
A Mediterranean tour was six times more likely to get cheaper than a Caribbean one.
This is the finding that actually changes what you do. Split the catalog by region and the "wait for a drop" advice separates cleanly into places where it is reasonable and places where it is a waste of attention.
| Region | Tours | Cuts | Hikes | Tours that ever got cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caribbean, Bahamas & Mexico | 1,306 | 44 | 93 | 41 (3.1%) |
| Europe & Mediterranean | 792 | 165 | 243 | 160 (20.2%) |
| Alaska & Canada | 281 | 12 | 77 | 11 (3.9%) |
| Asia-Pacific | 219 | 58 | 4 | 58 (26.5%) |
| US homeports & Hawaii | 168 | 1 | 4 | 1 (0.6%) |
Nearly half of Carnival's excursion catalog sits in the Caribbean, Bahamas and Mexico — and that half is where prices move least. Roughly one tour in 32 has ever been discounted there.
Alaska is the sharpest version of the problem. Its 281 tours took 77 price increases and 12 cuts, so watching and waiting there has been more likely to cost you than save you.
If your ship is going to Cozumel, there is nothing to wait for. If it's going to Mykonos, there might be.
The price tag is not the signal. Cut rates by price bracket run between 4% and 14% with no clean trend, so an expensive tour is not meaningfully more likely to be discounted than a cheap one. The port is the variable that matters.
Carnival's Busiest Caribbean Ports Barely Reprice
Four of Carnival's twelve biggest Caribbean ports have not changed a single excursion price in five months.
These are the ports most Carnival guests actually visit, listed by how many tours Carnival sells at each.
| Port | Tours | Median price | Cuts | Hikes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Celebration Key, The Bahamas | 78 | $126.99 | 0 | 0 |
| Cozumel, Mexico | 59 | $106.99 | 3 | 3 |
| Amber Cove, Dominican Republic | 59 | $103.99 | 2 | 2 |
| Isla Tropicale, Roatan | 53 | $99.99 | 4 | 1 |
| Mahogany Bay, Roatan | 52 | $99.99 | 0 | 0 |
| Nassau, The Bahamas | 47 | $120.99 | 1 | 8 |
| Grand Turk | 45 | $94.99 | 6 | 3 |
| Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands | 41 | $88.99 | 0 | 3 |
| San Juan, Puerto Rico | 40 | $89.99 | 1 | 1 |
| Ocho Rios, Jamaica | 39 | $99.99 | 0 | 0 |
| St. Thomas, Usvi | 38 | $94.99 | 0 | 2 |
| Half Moon Cay, The Bahamas | 29 | $49.99 | 0 | 0 |
Celebration Key is the clearest case. Carnival's new Bahamas destination carries 78 tours, the largest lineup at any port in the catalog, and not one of them has listed at a different price since April.
Compare that to the deepest cuts elsewhere, which ran to 38% off in Greece and the Canary Islands. Same cruise line, same storefront, very different pricing behavior.
Carnival cuts excursion prices — just not in your port
Free Monday + Friday emails — market reports, price drops, and where the deals are.
When Cuts Do Land, They Hit a Whole Port at Once
Two thirds of all Carnival excursion cuts came in same-port, same-day batches.
Carnival does not appear to discount tours one at a time. Of the 280 cuts we logged, 189 landed on a day when three or more tours in the same port were cut together.
All 280 cuts fit into just 106 port-days, and only 59 of the 150 days we checked saw any cut anywhere in the catalog. On the other 91 days, the entire Carnival excursion catalog held still.
| Port | Day | Tours cut | Typical cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cairns, Australia | May 13 | 16 | -27% |
| Helsinki, Finland | Aug 8 | 11 | -13% |
| Airlie Beach, Australia | May 13 | 11 | -27% |
| Malaga, Spain | Aug 22 | 10 | -16% |
| Mykonos, Greece | Aug 22 | 9 | -9% |
| Bilbao, Spain | Sep 5 | 8 | -11% |
| Darwin, Australia | May 13 | 8 | -25% |
| Tenerife, Canary Islands | Jul 12 | 7 | -29% |
May 13 was the single biggest repricing day of our tracking window. Carnival cut 51 excursions across six ports that day, most of them Australian — 18% of every cut in five months, in 24 hours.
That is what makes checking back cheap. If a cut is coming to your port it will probably arrive as one event, so a glance every couple of weeks catches it as well as daily obsessing does.
If a Price Drops, You Don't Need to Rush
Nearly nine in ten Carnival excursion cuts held for the rest of our tracking.
The other half of "wait for the drop" is the fear that a drop disappears while you think about it. Our data does not support that worry.
Of the 280 cuts, 33 were followed later by a price increase on the same tour — 12%. Those reversals arrived a median of eight days after the cut, so even the ones that bounced left more than a week of room.
Should You Wait on a Carnival Excursion?
The practical version is short. Book Caribbean tours on your own schedule, check European and Australian ports every week or two, and when something drops, take it without treating it as a countdown.
And keep the sums in proportion. The median Carnival excursion is $119.99, and a 13% cut on it is about $16 a person. In our Carnival Jubilee pricing guide, the same balcony cabin swings by hundreds of dollars per person depending on season and booking window. The fare is where the real money is.
How We Track This Data
- We check Carnival's online pre-cruise excursion catalog every day, and have since April 14, 2026. That is 2,766 tours across 166 ports and 314,870 price checks over 150 days, all in US dollars and all adult pricing.
- A "price change" means a tour listed at a different price than the last time we saw it. Tours that appeared or disappeared from the catalog are not counted as changes.
- Coverage starts in spring 2026, not a full year. We cannot yet say what Carnival excursions do during Wave Season or Black Friday, and we will update this post as the window grows.
- We track the pre-cruise storefront only. Nothing here describes what the same tour costs once you are onboard.
- One outlier is excluded from our cut figures as a relisting rather than a discount — an Iceland whale-watching tour that moved from $299.99 to $31.99 in June.
- This add-on tracking sits alongside our fare data — 12M+ fare snapshots across 17 cruise lines and 226 ships, plus 10.4M+ onboard add-on price records across the lines we follow.
Cruise Price Tracker for Carnival scores every Carnival fare 0-100 against its own price history — so the cabin is priced fairly before you start booking tours on top of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Graham H — Founder, All Aboard Deals
Graham has been cruising for over a decade and has sailed on 15+ cruises across Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Norwegian, and Virgin.
He built All Aboard Deals to track cruise prices the same way traders track charts — monitoring 29,000+ sailings and spotting fares that fall well below their recent averages.
Editorial Standards
All guides are based on real pricing data, live fare checks, and historical trends. Content is updated as ships launch and prices change. Questions or corrections? Contact us