Tender ports

As someone who does not LOVE to tender, I’m curious if any of my newly revised ports are tender ports . We are headed to St. Lucia St. Kitts, Martinique and St. Thomas. I know that St. Thomas is not a tender port, can anyone tell me if the others are? Thanks!!

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

There's always a chance to tender if there are more ships that mooring spots but I've never tendered in any of those ports. So, it's likely you'll dock throughout your cruise.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

As someone who does not LOVE to tender, I’m curious if any of my newly revised ports are tender ports . We are headed to St. Lucia St. Kitts, Martinique and St. Thomas. I know that St. Thomas is not a tender port, can anyone tell me if the others are? Thanks!!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

On my cruise in 2015 there were more ships in St. Thomas than there were docks, so our ship had to tender. So it can happen in St. Thomas.

There's always a chance to tender if there are more ships that mooring spots but I've never tendered in any of those ports. So, it's likely you'll dock throughout your cruise.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

There are factors that come into play contract agreements with the port and size of ship.

Piers and docks built and maintained by a cruise line will have priority to its own ships

A larger ship may have priority to use the pier/dock over a much smaller one.

Length of time and use of the pier may also be considered.

Generally when a port has only one pier the cruise lines work together to avoid scheduling conflicts

sometimes resulting in odd arrival and departure times.

Tendering is fraught with safety issues and is avoided when other options are open i.e. remote docks/piers

and ground transport to the main pier area such as at Juneau and Ketchikan Alaska.

On my cruise in 2015 there were more ships in St. Thomas than there were docks, so our ship had to tender. So it can happen in St. Thomas.

Same thing happened to us in St. Thomas.

Also, several years ago in St. Maarten, a NCL ship had to tender because of too many ships.

See the bottom of this page...

 

https://www.ncl.com/about/accessible-cruising

Thanks for posting the link.

thank you all for the responses. I imagine if any given port was scheduled to have "too many" ships in at one time we would know once on board. I'm just not a fan. I find it stressful and chaotic. I absolutely love GSC (previous trips) but man, that line is brutal. We are platinum now so I figure there is priority for that but I'm glad to hear that for the most part, those ports are usually not tender ports.