Falmouth Tender / Immigration

[mawvkysc]

On my upcoming HAL (Zuiderdam) TA will have only one stop in the UK. It will be Falmouth. I’m thinking this ship is large enough that we can’t  dock there. So we will tender. I’m assuming we will have to do an  immigration check. Anyone have experience of how smooth the process will be? Will we most likely tender? 

 

Last cruise we had this situation in Bar Harbour. It was an awful mess and we almost missed out non ship shore excursion. 

[sleepingcat]

Same ship was in Falmouth this last summer:

hursday, June 1: Zuiderdam - arriving 8am, departing 4pm, approx. number of passengers: 2,000

So you can maybe check what happened on that visit. I would post on the HAL board, or see if anyone posted a review. 

 

Link below should give you the info you need about vessel size. 

https://www.falmouthharbour.co.uk/shipping-and-harbour-operations/cruise-destination/

 

as well as other insights for Falmouth. 

[fruitmachine]

14 hours ago, mawvkysc said:

On my upcoming HAL (Zuiderdam) TA will have only one stop in the UK. It will be Falmouth. I’m thinking this ship is large enough that we can’t  dock there. So we will tender. I’m assuming we will have to do an  immigration check. Anyone have experience of how smooth the process will be? Will we most likely tender? 

 

Last cruise we had this situation in Bar Harbour. It was an awful mess and we almost missed out non ship shore excursion. 

To quote from a Regent passenger arriving in Edinburgh (I know, different port, different cruise line, but the common denominator is UK Border Force, which is what matters here):

"Our first port was Edinburgh, a tender port. The evening before we arrived, we were told that that Immigration would pay us a visit in the morning to check our passports. This seemed like a surprise to Regent but it shouldn’t have because previous cruises coming from a “foreign” port did get the same visit. The process was orderly but it seemed useless because the immigration officers just glanced at our passport. It felt that as long as you had some passport and you were a human, you were good to go."

UK Border Force get the full passenger & crew manifest in advance of arrival.  Before getting on the ship, they run it through all their checks, so there will be few, if any, passengers that they have any interest in.  Unless there is particular intelligence, I'd be surprised if many people, at any transit call in the UK, have a different experience to this Regent passenger.

 

I'm aware of an elderly French passenger that, due to a slip-up by the cruise line, managed to get on a ship in France with no passport.  When he arrived at the first UK port of call in Edinburgh he had no passport to show to the Border Force agents, and the ship thought they had left him behind.  A technical stowaway!  Even that complication was ironed out, and he continued his cruise with some temporary documentation issued by UK Border Force.