Disembarkation

It's bad enough your days of pampering come to a close, but disembarkation is always a miserable end to a cruise. At best, you scramble for your luggage, wait on line to clear customs, search for your transfers and hope to make your connections for home. At the end of these successive melees, you feel like a piece of human garbage. Windstar (our last cruise with them) locked us in the building with the bathrooms in their hurry to clear the ship. They then loaded the people who took their overpriced post-cruise transfers into busses, abandoning the rest in an isolated part of the port. The few taxis jacked up their prices. Only after I asked a man with a cell phone to call the 800 number on top of one of the taxis did any more taxis show up. Cruise lines blame the port, and vice-versa. How will you change this system?

Hello Joanandjoe,

I understand the frustration regarding disembarkation as well as embarkation. It’s a challenge in the industry overall.

The challenge we face is finding a balance between guests who are embarking as well as guests who are disembarking. There is a small window and turnaround time required with preparing the Suites for new guests. We are also fully aware that guests disembarking do not want to feel hurried and rushed in the process.

We can do a better job at utilizing common areas to make this process more enjoyable for all of our guests. I’ll be informing the appropriate team members about this in order to determine what we can enhance from our end.

In addition, we do our best to work with governments to make the disembarkation process as comfortable as possible for our guests. Ultimately, this process is dictated by local Customs procedures and we must abide by those rules. For example in all U.S. ports, all guests are required to disembark at the same time.

Appreciate your comment and look forward to working on this to make our future guests experience more enjoyable during embarkation and disembarkation.

Sincerely,

Mark

Also, if you visit the "Embarkation, Disembarkation & Visitors" section of our FAQ page here, you will find even more information including the standard procedures. - Mark