Can You Leave a Cruise Ship at a Different Port Than Your Destination?

• To debark to go ashore for a few hours, yes. Most people do; no one is required to book official excursions. You are expected to return to the ship well before sailing. (If you don’t, the ship WILL leave without you. Whereas if you took an official ship’s excursion and there is an unavoidable delay, the captain will wait for that excursion group to return.)

• To fully debark the ship with your luggage at a port where people normally DON’T debark, also yes. That can be done fairly easily, and in fact I have once done so to make the travel home simpler for my wife and myself. Read on if you wish to learn more!

[TL;DR: Yes, you can debark in a different port.]

My wife and I took a long cruise back in early 2015, I think, where we looped around Japan, touched Korea, back to a Japan loop, stopped in China, back to loop Japan and would head back to Tianjin, China (https://goo.gl/maps/5zv8MUhsf5bzm9kY6) as our last port stop. We stayed aboard 29 days.

(Note that as far as booking this cruise, it was just four roughly week-long cruises in a row. We just didn’t get off the ship when everyone else did, three times.)

[It was on this ship, the Voyager of the Seas]

But wait a minute… I LIVE in Japan. And that last little jaunt...

Why would we go back to China (AGAIN), need to get me a transit visa for China (we didn't want to visit), travel to and through a busy airport with our luggage, go through bullshit security, have to comply with baggage weight and size limits and various other airplane boarding nonsense, only to fly back home to Japan in half a day, at best?

It seemed kind of silly, wasting our time and money. Missing the last two days of the cruise across the ocean (which would have been days 30 and 31 of our cruise) was trivial in comparison.

So, several weeks BEFORE THE CRUISE BEGAN, I emailed the cruise line directly, using the contact information they gave us with our contract, and explained the situation. If we could please debark with our luggage at the ship’s last stop in Hakata, Japan (https://goo.gl/maps/v9in3Zn5xRQhvm258)

…we could simply hop a taxi to the Shinkansen station, buy a ticket and be home to Kobe in a jiffy.

[Various Shinkansen. Photo courtesy of JR West Railways]

Naturally, they wouldn’t give us a refund for those last two cruise days—and I wasn't dumb enough to ask—but they had no problem with our debarking the ship there. The cruise line just made sure their Security people, and the Japanese Customs and Immigration people knew what was happening. They sent me an email to confirm it, and we were all set.

A few days before our departure, another long-traveling Japanese couple heard what we were doing, talked to the ship’s crew themselves, had things quickly arranged for them, and we four were the only ones debarking the ship at Hakata. The cruise director even came down to wave goodbye at our little group.

We talked to Japanese Immigration, I briefly opened my bag for Customs, and we were home in our cozy apartment in Kobe in less than three hours.