My husband,two friends and myself have just come back from a wonderful cruise on the Norwegian Jade, as we expected the standards of service on board were outstanding, along with the choice of restaurants, something for everyone,(you really don't have to eat it all!!) and the shows that we saw were top notch. The only niggle we had was the price of drinks and the added surcharge on most of the restaurants, when we travelled on the jewel 4yrs ago there was only one restaurant with a surcharge now there were only 3 without, and one of those you could only get food that was available all day eg burgers.Anyway onto our excursions, we previously went on the organised tours,we wouldn't want to miss the boat after all! But they were very expensive and often very long, so after reading cruise critic and tripadvisor decided to have go ourselves, and it was brilliant, we did Rome and Olympia ourselves and these were as easy as we had read about, just follow the crowd!For a trip to Florence/Pisa we booked Prestidge Rent Italy our driver was Giovanni, very eager to please and happy to help with any questions.For Athens we booked with Athens Taxis and our guide was Stelios, who obviously loved his city and took us to see the changing of the guard at the palace as well as the acropolis and a beauty spot that none of the coaches can get to!Finally for we booked with Aboutephesus.com for Ephesus again another great day with Evren an extremely knowledgeable chap fantastic value for money lunch was included in the price, which was excellent,served in a spotless restaurant, we told Evren we wouldn't be buying any carpets before we went into the carpet manufacturers and there was no pressure to buy at all, very tempting though!All of the trips we booked were excellent value we had comfortable clean people carriers for Florence and Ephesus and a Mercedes for Athens fine for four of us, they were all there at the ports waiting for us when we arrived, and we didn't miss the boat once!this isn't as detailed as some reveiws but there is plenty of info already written so go for it