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Sometimes, you take an excursion to realize that you don’t need an excursion

When my friend wanted to go to the beach on our port stop in Palma, I could have done some research on the internet about the beaches there, how far they were for the cruise port, etc. I bought a ship’s excursion because honestly, I just didn’t want to do the work.

We bought an excursion that was exclusively a transfer to the beach and back. At the beach where they took us (Palma Nova), we could pay to rent beach chairs/umbrellas and buy food and drinks, but none of that was included in the price — just the coach transfer.

I had been to Palma the year before, and I remembered that it was in a large industrial port — there was a 12 euro shuttle required to get out of the port area and into downtown. I figured, if we were going to have to pay for a shuttle anyway, we might as well make it easy on ourselves by booking the ship’s excursion.

We got to the beach in about half an hour and rented our beach chairs and umbrella (25 euros for the day). Because of the length of our excursion, we were going to have about three hours before we had to meet the bus transfer back to the ship.

About an hour after we arrived, a friend we were traveling with asked which beach we were at. I sent him a Google maps location of where we were, and he and three of our other friends took a taxi to join us there, for a cost of 25 euros.

Now that we knew how close the beach was and how affordable the taxis were, we decided to skip the second half of the bus transfer and take our own taxi back to the ship. We were able to spend more time on the beach, make the most of our chair rental, and still make it back to the port on time.

We might have spent a little more than we needed to, but it was a good reminder that there’s nothing wrong with using a ship excursion as an introduction to a destination. Now that I know how easy and inexpensive it is to get to a great beach by taxi, that’s probably the route I’ll take the next time I’m in Palma.