Everglade Tickets

[Lisa1976]

We are travelling to Florida in March and would really love to do the Everglades whilst there. Apart from buying the excursion through Virgin (who our trip is booked with) does anyone know of an online ticket/excursion agent/website we can purchase this trip through?? :bounce:

[OKWTink]

Not certain quite what you mean. Is Virgin offering an escorted tour through a portion of the Everglades?

If you plan to have a car of your own, I'd recommend doing the trip on your own. You can drive through huge portions of the Everglades choosing to stop where and when you wish. There are any number of airboat tours/rides available.

Alligator Alley (route 75) as it runs from Naples to Miami is a great way to see some of the beautiful birds and not so beautiful gators. There are Seminole Indian reservation options along the way.

Hope this helps and that I'm not too far off the mark of what you meant! :)

[Keith]

Hi there,

The virgin trip is done by www.gatortours.com so you can book direct if you like. They pick you up from your hotel rather early in the morning and take you to your tour bus... from there it's a very long drive (or it feels like it) to the Billy Swamp in the everglades.

It's a good tour arriving back very late at night (so it really is a very tiring, very full, long day).

However, many on the tour that I went on were disappointed at the amount of time (or lack of it) actually spent in the everglades... not much more than 2 hours I'd guess. It was hard to complain because everything was great and I really enjoyed the ride on the multimillion pound boat etc... but as a tour labelled as everglades, I didn't feel we saw much. I still recommend it because of all the things we did see.

So if you do have your own car, Tink's idea is almost certainly better (we didn't have a car so didn't have a choice).

[OKWTink]

Ah Keith, I understand a bit better now. Yes, Chief Billy's is a pretty popular place!

If you drop further south, you will come to the Mikosukee Indian reservation/area, a different tribe than the wealthy Seminoles. They have really neat festivals at certain times of the year and it would be really neat to plan an excursion around one of those times.

There is the country's tiniest post office in Everglades City! :D

It would require your own transport of course, and that can be quite problematic if you don't care to hire your own car.

I'd imagine the tours offered are nice though too, but as you say, the time is mostly taken up in the travel to and from the short time spent in the 'glades.

[Lisa1976]

Tink & Keith, thanks for your replies. We knew that Virgin did their own organised trip to the Everglades but we didn't realise it was with Gator Tours, had bad experiences with them on our last trip to Florida so wouldn't want to do anything with them again.

What we wondered was if there was any other operator that offered this, like Keith Prowse for example. We would really love to do the air boat ride over the Everglades.

We wont have a car on our trip in March so unfortunately driving there isnt really an option for us.