Vancouver pier to airport

[EZJR]

Hi

We are cruising into Vancouver on a Sunday. We have a Noon flight to US. Are taxis readily available at the pier? we are doing carry off as soon as we can.

Thank you

[martincath]

Taxis are as available as your fellow passengers allow them to be! How many other ships are in port with you is the biggest potential issue - and Sundays tend to be days with 3 or even 4 ships for most of the season, since most cruisers like to depart on weekends for 7 day trips.

 

Personally, since you indicated that you will be self-disembarking, I would make Plan A to head for the SkyTrain - especially on a Sunday this will be trivially easy to use, almost certainly faster than a cab, and definitely more consistent in timing. If you can walk off the ship with your bags, you can easily use SkyTrain with them - just walk out onto the street and turn left, ignore the first entrance (wrong platform) on Howe, turn left onto Cordova, and stroll downhill to the main Waterfront station building (huge, old, pillars out front, impossible to miss) enter any of the many doors and head straight downstairs to the Canada Line platform (escalators and elevator access too). Train floors meet platforms almost perfectly, if you can roll your bag into an elevator that's the sort of tiny gap you're looking at. Every seat has a metric buttload of legroom, and space underneath so you can flip your big cases over and slide them under - I'm 6'1" and 250lbs, and regularly take a 28" roller and a 20" carryon with me without any problems.

 

Your worst case with SkyTrain is rolling in just in time to see a YVR bound train pull out - and having to wait ~15mins on a Sunday morning until the next one. Then it's guaranteed to take less than 30mins (occasionally someone boarding as the doors close delays the train a few seconds here and there) to arrive at YVR. The walk to the station is maybe 10 minutes if you are slow on your feet, barely 5 if you hustle, so from pier to airport you're looking at somewhere from 35mins if you get right onto a train to 55 minutes worst case.

 

A cab without any traffic issues should take a similar ~35minutes to make the drive - but there's ALWAYS some roadworks, and just getting out of the pier can take a few minutes as there's only a single lane, so ~45mins is more likely. A slowdown at a few bottlenecks can easily see the cab travel time (and cost) increase - but unless there's a really big event, like Marathon or Pride weekends, by far the biggest issue is how long the queue is to get into a cab in the first place! It's far from unheard of to wait over an hour on 3+ ships days unless you're in the very first batch of people off... there are some weaselly tricks to deploy if you really want a cab but the queue is already long - head upstairs to street level, and ask the Pan Pacific hotel bell staff to call you a cab (a few bucks in-hand should avoid any question about you being a hotel guest or not!), or cross the street to the Fairmont Waterfront or down a couple blocks to the Pacific Rim and do the same if there are already a bunch of other people trying the same trick!

 

But for me, Plan A would always be SkyTrain (if you walk out and see that there are not many people waiting in the cab queue, by all means just join it though! If you only wait 10mins or less, the total time probably averages the same). The biggest inconvenience on SkyTrain used to be getting the right tickets - but with the faregate system and US credit cards joining the rest of the planet with tappable Chips for several years now, most tourists can simply tap a Visa or Mastercard on the gates and walk right on, then do the same to get out... and be automatically billed the right amount for your time and day of travel at inter-bank exchange rates.

 

These days YVR security is back to almost TheBeforeTimes levels - while a NEXUS card is still a great idea for getting through quickly, if you self-disembark then you should beat most of the crowds whether by cab or SkyTrain, so check-in, bag drop, and security should be maybe 30-40mins. CBP preclearance you can use either Global Entry or NEXUS to get into the short queue, but the kiosks mean that even for Regular Joes it's most likely a 20min or less process.

 

Check the port timetable here (scroll down, there's a link to the most up-to-date PDF) to see who else is in port with you. If you're the only ship, easy-peasy; if there's at least one other be aware that even if you are the first person off your vessel, the other ship's Self-Disembarkers might be released first by CBSA so the cab queue could already be growing before you even set foot on the gangplank. The more ships, and the bigger they are, the greater the chance that no matter what you do the cab queue could be an hour already...

[Ashland]

Taking the elevator up to the Pan Pacific and/or crossing the street to the Fairmont would be I think the easiest option for me. 

 

We had our private shuttle meet us in front of the Pan Pacific this past September and it worked out so easy for the 6 of us. We were the only ones it seemed using the elevator up to the lobby after self disembarking.

 

The downstairs bus/taxi area was a mess with two ships there.

[EZJR]

Thanks there are 3 ships the same day. I will print the sky train directions as well as Pan Pacific idea.