Where do I park

Greetings cruisers

Welcome back, it fells like only yesterday I posted about the hurricane updates, seems things are moving along very nicely and the islands are now planning to welcome cruise ships back.

Anyways something a little closer to home, UK cruise departures from Southampton, as many more of us are travelling down to Southampton by car with our free car parking vouchers that we are offering, I thought I would just mention something about how this works. Southampton is a very busy port and not only accepts cruise ships but container ships too, so can be a crazy place at times. Some of you may have noticed that when you print your edocs it never mentions what port the ship will be departing from, well there is a very simple reason for this and it has everything to do with planning and unexpected schedule changes. The reason the cruise lines do not always confirm to you the departure gates is because things can change at a moments notice and if they do it can cause major issues if the cruise line confirms a departure gate, as you can imagine, obviously if there is a schedule change late on and the cruise line cant inform you quick enough, thousands of people will all turn up at the wrong gate and cause major traffic issues. So your asking “how do I know then if there has been a schedule change?”

Simple, once you head off the motorway and turn left into Southampton, there will be signs for each ship directing you to the correct gate, just follow those and you will be sorted, don’t even worry if your edoc had a confirmed gate, ignore this and follow the signs, these are set up early in the morning of the day of your arrival and will be the latest and correct information.

So always remember to set your tom tom to the city of Southampton, not the terminal your ship is departing from, it could be wrong.

Hope that helps

Until next time

Keep on cruising