Which pier in Vancouver? Bags?

[Dave in Atlanta]

We're travelling on the Radiance Southbound to Vancouver in September. Which of Vancouver's docks will the ship use? How much difference will it make to our plans to tour Vancouver for the day?

 

Also, does anyone know how the "check your bags to your airline from the ship" program works? There is very little information available, and it would really help our plans for touring Vancouver that Saturday if our bags were headed to the airport on their own...

 

Thanks for the help!

 

Dave

[clknam]

We're travelling on the Radiance Southbound to Vancouver in September. Which of Vancouver's docks will the ship use? How much difference will it make to our plans to tour Vancouver for the day?

 

Also, does anyone know how the "check your bags to your airline from the ship" program works? There is very little information available, and it would really help our plans for touring Vancouver that Saturday if our bags were headed to the airport on their own...

 

Thanks for the help!

 

Dave

 

When we did the roundtrip tour last year, we left out of Ballantyne Pier. Here is a website that will tell you which pier your cruise will leave out of and directions to get there: http://www.portvancouver.com/.

 

We did the check your bas to your airline and LOVED it. I believe you have to sign up for the service at lest 48 hours before the end of the cruise and they will give you special tags for them. We left them out the night before and they were waiting for us to pick up when we landed. We then got our boarding passes for the plant before we left the ship the following morning. It's a really nice feature if you want to tour the city before your flight.

 

Cheers!

[critterchick]

If you google "Vancouver port schedule," you will find the website for the port, and a cruise ship schedule that will tell you whether you leave from Ballentyne or Canada Place. RCI usually uses Ballentyne.

 

We used the "wave goodbye to your bags" program in 2004 and it was great. We had to fill out a form 3-4 days before the end of the cruise stating our flight & the number of bags we were checking. We got special luggage tags on the last night & put our bags out. We didn't see them again until we arrived in Los Angeles. In the morning, we had to report to the Aurora Theater at 7:30 (tip: have breakfast first and don't rush to get there because they won't be ready and will deal with the excursions first, so 8:00 should be fine). They gave us boarding passes and claim check tickets and then we were free to disembark. We chose to have some more coffee first, but had we left, we would have been through Canadian customs in about 5 minutes, and on our way shortly after that.

 

My understanding is that you can either do the "independent" traveller thing, which we did, or use the ship's transfer to the airport, in which case you'll bypass the usual security checkin. The only thing we saved time on was not having to check in with the airline - we still had to go through the US Customs line and security. But it was nice not having to schlep our bags all the way through to that point.

[trixie54]

Does the goodbye bags program apply to all airlines?