SEATAC to port of Vancouver

[gerrimom]

Can assist me in finding public transportation. I arrive in Seattle by air and will find a hotel. The next day I need public transport to get to the port in Vancouver. Has any one done this? Thanks in advance.

[mapleleaves]

Options include:

- Amtrak Cascades train. Scenic ride, almost 4 hrs. 

- Quick Shuttle has direct service between the airport and Canada Place but look carefully at the schedule becuase some of the runs have many stops 

- Bolt Bus

- Greyhound Bus

- Alaska Airlines 

- cruiseline transfer

- rental car ( 3-4 hr drive )

 

Be aware of where the depots are for each option, as you may need a cab to get you there. ie Seatac airport to downtown, or Vancouver train depot to Canada Place.

 

 

[martincath]

Actually a Seattle local did use public buses & light rail to get all the way to downtown Vancouver for a cheapie cruise a couple of years back, and made it OK on day of embarkation. But I presume you'd rather just get on ONE bus or train that covers the bulk of the distance than jump from tram to bus to SkyTrain etc.!

 

Multiple bus companies shuttle between downtown Seattle & Vancouver - Bolt, QuickShuttle, Greyhound, Cantrail and Amtrak. QuickShuttle also picks up at Seatac; if you are a solo travel staying in an airport hotel their service can be decent value (US$59) as it gets you from the airport right to the pier so no need to use any other transportation.

 

If you are a couple or more though, taking a cab from airport area to downtown Seattle, the Bolt or Greyhound Bus or Amtrak train to Vancouver Pacific Central Station, then another cab to the pier is usually cheaper (Bolt can be as low as $1pp, though it's usually $15-20pp) and since Bolt has fewer stops, faster than QS too. Timing can get a bit sticky though - you need to be on the morning train or a bus that leaves by ~10am to minimize your risks. Amtrak morning train has the least problems at the border, as there are no checks until it actually reaches Vancouver - and then the only folks being processed are you train pax. At $34pp, it's great value for such a comfy and relaxing trip.

 

Also worth checking if your cruiseline is running a chartered bus from Seatac - many mainstream lines do if there are enough folks flying to SEA using cruise airfares. Price tends to be higher than even QuickShuttle now, $69pp was last price I saw reported, but with no stops at all except usually a 'comfort stop' right before the border in case you have to wait there for a while being processed.

[peety3]

Be very cautious about using Amtrak, as the Seattle to Vancouver leg is the "end of the run" and any delays earlier will snowball into a big mess for you (it did for us).

[LEtue]

On 5/14/2019 at 12:15 AM, peety3 said:

Be very cautious about using Amtrak, as the Seattle to Vancouver leg is the "end of the run" and any delays earlier will snowball into a big mess for you (it did for us).

I haven't used the train in recent years but is this new?  With early morning departure and the train already in the depot I assumed it had been there overnight. 

 

I am planning a cruise now so good to know! 

[peety3]

50 minutes ago, LEtue said:

I haven't used the train in recent years but is this new?  With early morning departure and the train already in the depot I assumed it had been there overnight. 

 

I am planning a cruise now so good to know! 

Which way are you going? The post title says Seatac to Vancouver, or northbound. As I understand it, the train starts in Portland or perhaps further south. That means it's at the mercy of whatever it encounters, and I can tell you from our one experience that it can be a figurative train wreck. To make the matter worse, they don't tell you anything if you're in the terminal (even if they did, the speakers are so tinny and the marble is so echo-y that you can't make it out), but they have a horrible habit of not committing to the screw-up quickly, and waiting HOURS before they decide to use buses to transport the passengers north. We gave up after nearly two hours and rented a car, but it meant we had to pay to park at the hotel, get up earlier and drive back south to YVR, drop off the rental, then pay a taxi to get us to the airport, for what could have been a leisurely walk of about 20 blocks to grab a yummy breakfast item at Blenz Coffee or perhaps the most Canadian coffee of all at Tim Hortons....wait for it...a latt-EH. 🙂

 

If you're going southbound (Vancouver to SeaTac), your odds are much better as you're not at the mercy of nearly as much.

[LEtue]

I would be going NB so thanks for the clarification.

[martincath]

Only the evening train is dependent on issues before Seattle. I recall peety posting about their trauma when it happened, and it certainly sucked (and I agree that the renovations in King Street did nothing but make the quality of the speakers worse if anything, acoustics are god-awful in that station so you need to go find a staff member to ask what the heck was announced almost every time...). The morning train in both directions though does indeed sit in the station overnight, with zero dependency on any other Amtrak service - and since the replacement Amtrak buses usually take less time to drive than the train does,  the only risk of missing a same-day cruise is if something catastrophic happens while you are en route.

 

While this does happen, it's extraordinarily rare - we've had one such incident ourselves, southbound, when some idiot in a truck that was too high for a bridge slammed into the bottom of it. We sat for three hours waiting for an engineer to be dispatched to check the bridge was still structurally sound for the train to cross over - but during that time we had updates every 30mins giving us an ETA for the engoneer's arrival, confirmation that they had arrived, an ETA for them completing the inspection. We certainly would rather have had that delay than just rolling over the bridge assuming it was still safe - but if it had been northbound, a same-day cruise might have been jeopardized. That said - with how full flights run these days, I'd bank on the train rather than ANY individual flight - I've had far, far more issues with flight delays than the Cascades train, and these days unless you are on a first class ticket with a crapton of Status such that they will bump another passenger for you to get you on the next flight any kind of mechanical or weather delay is way more likely to see you miss that same-day cruise than the train, which at least has a Plan B built in (large Amtrak bus fleet).

[peety3]

4 minutes ago, martincath said:

Only the evening train is dependent on issues before Seattle. I recall peety posting about their trauma when it happened, and it certainly sucked (and I agree that the renovations in King Street did nothing but make the quality of the speakers worse if anything, acoustics are god-awful in that station so you need to go find a staff member to ask what the heck was announced almost every time...). The morning train in both directions though does indeed sit in the station overnight, with zero dependency on any other Amtrak service - and since the replacement Amtrak buses usually take less time to drive than the train does,  the only risk of missing a same-day cruise is if something catastrophic happens while you are en route.

 

While this does happen, it's extraordinarily rare - we've had one such incident ourselves, southbound, when some idiot in a truck that was too high for a bridge slammed into the bottom of it. We sat for three hours waiting for an engineer to be dispatched to check the bridge was still structurally sound for the train to cross over - but during that time we had updates every 30mins giving us an ETA for the engoneer's arrival, confirmation that they had arrived, an ETA for them completing the inspection. We certainly would rather have had that delay than just rolling over the bridge assuming it was still safe - but if it had been northbound, a same-day cruise might have been jeopardized. That said - with how full flights run these days, I'd bank on the train rather than ANY individual flight - I've had far, far more issues with flight delays than the Cascades train, and these days unless you are on a first class ticket with a crapton of Status such that they will bump another passenger for you to get you on the next flight any kind of mechanical or weather delay is way more likely to see you miss that same-day cruise than the train, which at least has a Plan B built in (large Amtrak bus fleet).

The flaw in this is that a gentleman in the terminal the night of our adventure indicated that Amtrak is consistently slow to make the decision to roll the buses. Yes, they take less time than the train, but if they sit on their thumbs for seven hours (the typical delay this guy encountered, and I think he had at least six events to judge his numbers on), you'd go mad sitting on the wooden benches in King Street Station. In our case, I downloaded the app and signed up for status updates on our train: every 30 minutes, they'd announce a 30-minute delay, but every time, they told us to remain at the station as the train could mysteriously arrive at light speed.

[martincath]

8 minutes ago, peety3 said:

The flaw in this is that a gentleman in the terminal the night of our adventure indicated that Amtrak is consistently slow to make the decision to roll the buses. Yes, they take less time than the train, but if they sit on their thumbs for seven hours (the typical delay this guy encountered, and I think he had at least six events to judge his numbers on), you'd go mad sitting on the wooden benches in King Street Station. In our case, I downloaded the app and signed up for status updates on our train: every 30 minutes, they'd announce a 30-minute delay, but every time, they told us to remain at the station as the train could mysteriously arrive at light speed.

Except it's only a flaw EVENING Peety. In the morning, the train has been sat there waiting, ready to rock & roll all night (even if it was SUPER late arriving the night before, it's a different crew for the morning northbound so no issues with union-mandated breaks as the scheduled arrival time from Vancouver is too close to the morning departure to ever allow the same crew to run both legs). When sh*t hits then fan while the train is en route, the ONLY remotely common cause of a long enough delay to impact cruisers is a landslide - thanks to track changes and hillside reinforcement the frquency of those is down to a small fraction of those that happend even 5 years ago. When they do happen, buses are despatched as soon as they are aware of the slide - we've lived through one of these too! Freight priority, bridge openings might add an hour to the trip - but it's just totally unplanned for issues like our 'idiot truck driver' scenario that could possibly delay the morning train enough to even come close to risking missing a cruise at 4pm or later.

 

So while I am in total agreement that the northbound evening train is quite often VERY late - the lack of double-tracking and illegal allowance of freight priority by both BNSF and Union Pacific means that once the passenger train slips out of the safe 'pocket' between freight trains it gets later and later, as it can be held in station after station waiting for the next freight train to overtake it, so basically if it's more than about 30mins late it ends up in a cascading series of delays that bumps it toward the 2-3 hours late mark pretty quickly - but these problems do not impact the morning train. UP suck even harder than BNSF for freight prioritization, so it's the south of Portland part that tends to cause the issues - and only one of the trains daily uses those tracks, the morning Southbound and evening Northbound. The other train literally just travel between Seattle & Vancouver, and the ~7 hour gap between them arriving anfd then heading the other way guarantees that as long as the train or track are not totally non-functional, the train is always ready for the return trip next morning thanks to the new crew

[peety3]

Our delay was trees and wires across the tracks. I don't think that's limited to the evening trains, and I don't think that's something that Amtrak instantly says "buses instead!".

[martincath]

12 hours ago, peety3 said:

Our delay was trees and wires across the tracks. I don't think that's limited to the evening trains, and I don't think that's something that Amtrak instantly says "buses instead!".

It actually is more often an issue south of Seattle, and therefore on the evening northbound train rather than morning: firstly, the Canadian railroad tracks are signficantly less impacted by any kind of landslide or treefall due to crossing virtually flat land and passing through almost all farmland and urban areas rather than forested wilderness; secondly the track improvements in WA stablized hillsides where trees were most prone to being brought down. It's also a shorter run than from Eugene to Seattle, so even if the risks per mile traveled were the same rather than reduced, there's less distance so less total risk of a tree faling on the track.

 

As to the communication, or lack thereof - I'm certainly not going to claim that our own experience is the norm and yours unusual, and I've found that service standards vary train by train down to individual conductors, bistor car attendants etc. Whether you have good or bad people working on that shift, who knows - but the same crappy communication happens with airlines, bus companies etc. so barring driving yourself you're always subject to that factor regardless of travel method (and frankly airlines in general suck much harder at communicating than Amtrak does!)

 

Sh*t happens - it also happens to the alternative travel methods. Cars and buses break down, border crossing have incidents that close them, planes have a vast array of problems due to 'your' plane potentially being the other side of the country before it comes to you so bad weather just about anywhere can compromise your flight. Sitting for four hours in Atlanta, while Delta delivered no useful communication whatsoever about how long it was going to take to replace the single windscreen wiper on our plane that had meant our flight was held on the tarmac - after an hour we were deplaned and then wandered the terminal checking departure screens as that was the only way to get updates on our delay - which eventually ended up being four hours late, was far worse than our three hours sitting on Amtrak waiting for the bridge check, especially considering the relative situations! Taking 4 hours to replace a wiper in your home base vs. having to get an engineer out to a random countryside bridge? But one crappy airline experience has not made us recommend everyone stop flying 😉

[LEtue]

I agree and "ship" happens but we're going ahead with the train.  A nice relaxing ride with gorgeous scenery!

[LEtue]

19 hours ago, martincath said:

It actually is more often an issue south of Seattle, and therefore on the evening northbound train rather than morning: firstly, the Canadian railroad tracks are signficantly less impacted by any kind of landslide or treefall due to crossing virtually flat land and passing through almost all farmland and urban areas rather than forested wilderness; secondly the track improvements in WA stablized hillsides where trees were most prone to being brought down. It's also a shorter run than from Eugene to Seattle, so even if the risks per mile traveled were the same rather than reduced, there's less distance so less total risk of a tree faling on the track.

 

As to the communication, or lack thereof - I'm certainly not going to claim that our own experience is the norm and yours unusual, and I've found that service standards vary train by train down to individual conductors, bistor car attendants etc. Whether you have good or bad people working on that shift, who knows - but the same crappy communication happens with airlines, bus companies etc. so barring driving yourself you're always subject to that factor regardless of travel method (and frankly airlines in general suck much harder at communicating than Amtrak does!)

 

Sh*t happens - it also happens to the alternative travel methods. Cars and buses break down, border crossing have incidents that close them, planes have a vast array of problems due to 'your' plane potentially being the other side of the country before it comes to you so bad weather just about anywhere can compromise your flight. Sitting for four hours in Atlanta, while Delta delivered no useful communication whatsoever about how long it was going to take to replace the single windscreen wiper on our plane that had meant our flight was held on the tarmac - after an hour we were deplaned and then wandered the terminal checking departure screens as that was the only way to get updates on our delay - which eventually ended up being four hours late, was far worse than our three hours sitting on Amtrak waiting for the bridge check, especially considering the relative situations! Taking 4 hours to replace a wiper in your home base vs. having to get an engineer out to a random countryside bridge? But one crappy airline experience has not made us recommend everyone stop flying 😉

Can you tell me if 2 people traveling together in business class need to purchase their tickets together - to be seated together?  Or is it just general boarding that comes with the priority? 

[martincath]

1 hour ago, LEtue said:

Can you tell me if 2 people traveling together in business class need to purchase their tickets together - to be seated together?  Or is it just general boarding that comes with the priority? 

Purchase together? No - but they'll need to show up at the station together, or at least join the queue for seat allocation together, in order to be seated together.

[LEtue]

12 minutes ago, martincath said:

Purchase together? No - but they'll need to show up at the station together, or at least join the queue for seat allocation together, in order to be seated together.

Perfect!  We are trying to keep our expenses separate and since passport info and more is needed it will be nice to each do our own....

We will definitely be arriving together 

 

[port msp]

Consider Kenmore Air floatplane service from Downtown Seattle to Downtown Vancouver.  It's an hour flight and $150ish+.  Their base at Coal Harbor in Vancouver is an easy walk to Canada Place.  

 

In Seattle they take off from Lake Union.  You could cab it there, or take light rail from Seatac and Uber/walk to Lake Union.  I've done the trip the other way (from Victoria) and it was pretty easy.  We landed at Lake Union-- walked about a mile to Seattle Center--took the monorail to Westlake Station-- got on light rail at Westlake to Seatac.   This would all depend on you traveling pretty light because you're schlepping your own luggage.  

 

Personally, I'd never trust Amtrak when I had to make a same day connection.  I've been 5+ hrs late on an Amtrak trip.   

 

Depending on when your flight lands at SEATAC, I'd consider using Kenmore Air the same day, stay in a hotel right by Canada Place, and not deal with connections on embark day.  

 

https://www.kenmoreair.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIocK46bOz4gIVF7jACh1LGw83EAAYASAAEgI1evD_BwE