Interport sailing, how does this work and how do you organise it?

[Swampduck]

Hi all,

I'm trying to book a cruise for next August, in the med. A lot of the cruises start and finish in Rome. I would prefer to start and disembark in Barcelona, if possible. How do I go about booking this? In the Celeb brochure it mentions "Interport Sailings" but doesnt give information on how to do this.

Do you have any ideas or have experience of this?

Thanks in advance

[patty1955]

This doesn't answer your question, but will answer others question as to what interport sailing is. I found it on the Celebrity UK site:

What is an Interport sailing?A: Some of our ships operate what we call 'Interport sailings.' This means that a guest boards at a specific port during part of a scheduled itinerary and can then disembark at the same port during the ship's next scheduled itinerary, in effect doing a portion of two regular scheduled sailings. Please note that it may not be possible for 'Interporting' guests to pre-book Spa Reservations in advance of their Interport sailing.

[Swampduck]

Thats what I seen also, which got me thinking.. this opens up a whole set of new doors. I have sent a message to Celebrity to see how & what to do. I will keep you updated to how I get on. But in the meantime, any information would be most welcome.

thanks

[Project_gal]

I did not know that Celebrity had ever offered this. As is was cited as the reason proper safety drill had not taken place before the Costa Concordia disaster, I suspect that, if Celebrity offered this in the past, they may not be so willing to any longer.

[chengkp75]

Interporting is still common on Med cruises, even post Concordia. They just have multiple muster drills for those joining at the various ports. The problem is that the cruise line needs to have blocks of cabins set up for round trips from each embarkation port, and the cabins normally don't switch back and forth between embarkation ports, as that would require sailing empty for a few days, so cabin selection becomes more limited.

[dutchclogs]

My experience with Royal Caribbean is that whilst there were two ports of embarkation, in practice one was a primary -- that is the majority of passengers embarked there -- and that the cruise was geared towards that port, impacting on cruise excursions and entertainment.

Having embarked at the 'second' port, I would not be keen to do so again unless I expressly wanted to spend extra days at that port, and of course the pricing was attractive.

It seems that there can be quite a price difference between the two ports, probably as others say above, there will be an allocation of cabins per embarkation port with perhaps the more limited (if that is that is so) more quickly filling up?