Flying in from WI, thinking of coming a day early

[HGPLynnE]

When we sailed out of Miami a couple of years ago and when we go again in 4 weeks we are renting a car. We picked it up at the airport and then when we returned it to the rental agency they took us to the port. On the return trip we just caught a cab at the pier back to the Miami airport. It was nice that we could run to the store and pick up those last minute things we forgot to pack and also to be able to pick a restaurant outside of the hotel to eat at.

 

Hope this helps. Just check that the rental agency has a port shuttle. The port of miami website lists those agencies that have port privileges.

[stargate fan]

The only prices I have so far are thru Carnival, as an add-on. I realize we are going to have to pay the $50/pp to change our flights to the day before and after the cruise.

I have gotten so much info from this thread and from the Port thread under Florida departures, that I think we just might book a hotel, and either stay downtown and taxi to the pier or stay at a hotel that has a free shuttle from the airport, and just take that back to the airport and pay the $25 for a taxi to the pier, or another option we have is to rent the car and drop it off near the pier, making sure the car rental place will run us over to the pier. As you can see it's been 15 yrs since our last Carnival, and we went in June, so weather wasn't an issue. Our Disney Cruise, we had land before and after so that wasn't an issue either.

Again, thanks for all of your great advise. I will spend the day tomorrow seeing what I can figure out.

 

We sailed out of Miami three time. The first time, we flew in the day of the cruise. It was February and we live in New England. We learned our lesson as we were almost fogged in.

Since then, we always fly in before our cruise. We once stayed at the Mariott Biscayne Bay. Nice hotel but there is nothing to do nearby. We had to grab a taxi every time we wanted to go anywhere. There was a shuttle from the hotel to the port for $10 per person.

We decided to try the Holiday Inn Port of Miami this past July. Great choice! We were directly across the street from the Bayside Marketplace. There were restaurants and lots of cute shops for us to walk around. The taxi ride was very inexpensive since we were so close to the port. We also had a great view of the ships coming in to port at 5:00 am.

Do not take the cruise shuttle to the ship. Your luggage will be loaded onto the bus, then you will have to wait until the bus is full of passengers. You could literally be waiting hours. We have never rented a car, so we can't comment on that.