Vancouver Luggage Drop-Off and Check-In When Two Large Ships Are Departing

[Sea-n-Ease]

I've been reading on CC that porters are ready to accept cruise luggage at the Vancouver garage ~10:00a.  The day our cruise departs, a 5,000 passenger ship is scheduled to arrive, but not until 9:30a.

 

1)  Will there still be porters in the garage accepting luggage by ~10:00a?

 

2)  That same 5,000 passenger ship departs two hours after our ship, which is 4,000 passengers and a 4:00p departure.  We were thinking of dropping our luggage early, then a doing a little nearby sight-seeing/brunch before returning to Canada Place between 1:00 and 2:00 for check-in to miss the "crowds".  However, with our 4,000 passengers departing at 4:00p and the other 5,000 passengers departing at 6:00p, should we do the other extreme and drop luggage early then proceed directly to Check-in/Screening/CBP?  We have Priority Boarding, which I know only affects our ship boarding and not the other Canada Place queues.

[ROCruiser]

Our experience last year on a B2B with transit in Vancouver was not pleasant. Took more than an hour to get back on the ship after a day touring the city, even for transit passengers. I would not get too far from Canada Place with that many passengers on those ships. Get on the ship and enjoy a relaxing afternoon and admire the city from there. 

[mattR]

7 hours ago, ROCruiser said:

Our experience last year on a B2B with transit in Vancouver was not pleasant. Took more than an hour to get back on the ship after a day touring the city, even for transit passengers. I would not get too far from Canada Place with that many passengers on those ships. Get on the ship and enjoy a relaxing afternoon and admire the city from there. 

What time of day were you trying to get back on the ship? 

[martincath]

Dunno how I missed this first time around!

 

OP @Sea-n-Ease, my opinion on embarkation is consistently to do it as late as you possibly can. You can drop bags literally any time until they stop accepting them - the only difference is when you are too early, during the time when folks are still having things unloaded from the ship, the regular bag drop becomes a more casual 'longshoremen with a cage down in parking' affair.

 

If this is one of the 'Royal Class ship arriving and leaving a bit late because of when low tide is' days, that does mean their Disembarkation will run later than normal, and Embarkation therefore start later for folks boarding that ship. For the folks on the other ship though, assuming those times are correct it can fit under Lions Gate more flexibly like almost every other ship based in Vancouver that isn't Royal class, so I expect a normal pattern - folks getting kicked off by 9:30 at the latest so the ship can be zeroed out.

 

Honestly though, depending where you pulled those times from it could be a total non-factor because they're wrong - Princess are notoriously incapable of planning for tide times, every season we see the arrival and departure times of all the Royal class vessels start shifting, and sometimes even when they've finally remembered that the ships only fit under during a really tight window they still don't alter the whole season worth of data at the beginning but spread it out, giving folks notice a month ahead of time that they are actually sailing in and out at 3am not 5pm! There's literally one accurate place - the official timetable from the Port of Vancouver on this page - and even that isn't always accurate for Royal class on a future date unless it lists something unusual (any overnight visits, and arrivals/departures outside a 6am-6pm zone, are almost certainly corrected for tides - but anything inside that 6-6 period could simply be what Princess originally booked last year and haven't gotten around to checking tide timetables yet before revising!)

 

Assuming your times are correct though, if you show up at 2pm there probably will be more people than usual at that time of day for the same total pax load just because ship 2 couldn't start boarding until later, but you'll still lose out on absolutely nothing onboard (there's never any exciting activities on embarkation day, and tax still applies in port so even if you have a booze package every drink'll cost ya something!), gain time in one of the best cities on the planet, and even if it takes you ~90mins to get onboard will still still have only spent basically the same amount of time waiting around as if you went straight to check-in at 10am!

 

The only added risk by having a a fun half-day in Vancouver is if you do something silly, like being over on the North Shore at 1pm and expecting to get back to the pier for 2pm - yes, in theory those Capilano shuttles allocate a 30min drive time and in no traffic scenarios that's accurate, but with very limited route options even a minor slowdown on the bridge could cause serious problems. Even midday can see backups, because the bridge centre lane is dynamically controlled from ~9am to 3pm, so as soon as southbound cars threaten to cause backups on Highway 1 they flip the middle lane to southbound to clear them - while commuter hours are consistent, which way gets 2 lanes and which way just 1 can be a crapshoot in-between!

 

So go do that right away if you're mad keen - if you are sensibly here for a pre-cruise night in a hotel, try dropping bags earlier, at 9am, and hopping right on the shuttle outside the pier, so you can be safely back downtown by noon.

 

But if you don't have Cap on your bucket list, just stick to sensibly close by downtown attractions - FlyOverCanada is right on the pier, the Harbour Centre viewing tower a few minutes walk, the cobbled streets of Gastown start barely a quarter mile away. As long as you know that from where you are at 1:45pm you can walk to the pier in <15mins, as long as you don't walk into traffic your risk of missing the ship is perfectly well managed!

[ROCruiser]

23 hours ago, mattR said:

What time of day were you trying to get back on the ship? 

Don't remember exactly, but I am pretty sure it was between 2:00-3:00PM. Fellow cruisers texted us and told us to come back to the terminal ASAP because of the long lines. We were on Cunard QE.