Overtourism is a huge problem at many locations throughout the world. It’s gotten so bad that some cities in Japan, Spain, Amsterdam, and Venice, among others, have either begun or plan to begin measures to help decrease the number of tourists who visit each year.
Cities that are home to cruise ship ports have a double whammy when it comes to the number of tourists. Besides the visitors who’ve arrived by car or plane, they also have an ongoing schedule of cruise ships that dock there. Each ship can carry upwards of thousands of people, and some locales host several cruise ships on the same day. It might be good for local business owners, but for those visiting for the day, it makes the city streets a crowded mess.
If you’re visiting a city via cruise ship, chances are you’ll only be there for a few hours. 6, 8, whatever. But if you’re visiting by other means, it’s possible that you’ll be stuck being surrounded by cruise ship tourists every day of your trip. Well, except for the days when there aren’t any ships in town.
But how do you know when that is?
Cruise ships, like airlines, know their schedules far ahead of time. In fact, unlike airlines, which only announce flights 11 months in advance (if that…giving you sideye, Southwest), you can make a reservation for a cruise upwards of 2 or more years ahead of time. So the respective schedule for each ship on each line is public knowledge if you know where to look. By ‘reverse engineering’ that information, you can also determine when cities have no ships (or as few as possible) in port.
Cruisemapper.com
CruiseMapper has actually been out for a while – since at least 2015, if not longer. And it has quite a few capabilities. Among other things, it can tell you:
- Info about all the ships out there (as of this writing there are just shy of 1,600 cruise ships around the world!)
- Every port where cruise ships dock
- All the different cruise lines (over 70 of them!)
- Deck plans for over 1,200 cruise ships
- Info about various types/levels of cabins and suites
- A history of accidents each ship has had (like when Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady crashed into a dock two summers ago and needed emergency repairs)
- News about cruises around the world
- A search function for any cruise, based on destination, departure port, ship name, itinerary dates, cruise length, ship type, etc.
But what piqued my interest was learning when ports would be empty, so I didn’t have to share, say, Key West, with an extra 3,000 people.
How to do it
Let’s say you want to learn Key West’s schedule. Just go to the Cruise Port Schedules page and you can search ports by name.
When you get to Key West, besides clarifying the local region, time and weather, it also gives you the schedule for which cruise ships will be in port, and when.
So if you were looking at, say, the first two weeks of March, you’d get a graphic that looks like this:
You’d see that two ships will be visiting on March 3rd, 5th, 10th, 12th and one ship on the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 9th,11th, 14th, 15th and 16th of the month. However, there are zero ships in port on March 7th and 13th. So a visit on March 7th through 9th, or 13th through 16th would be the best times to visit Key West this month, at least in terms of expected cruise ship crowds.
Or maybe Iceland is on your bucket list. Most people fly into Reykjavik, spend a day or two there, and then continue on to see the rest of the country. Heads up though, because when cruise season starts (in May), there are a few days when there are two cruise ships in port, which will make for bigger crowds just about everywhere.
Both Key West and Reykjavik are relatively small towns and only allow 2 cruise ships at a time to be in port. But places like Civitavecchia? By the summertime, they can easily have 3, 4 or even 5 cruise ships in port most days of the month. Nassau? They continually have 5 to 6 cruise ships in port almost every day. Cozumel? Well, today, March 5th, they’ve had eight ships in port.
So if you’re planning a trip to a port city, but aren’t arriving by ship, it might be a good idea to see what the quietest time of the year/season/month is, so you can avoid the more overwhelming crowds. Cruisemapper’s Cruise Port Schedules page can be a big help with your planning.
Feature Image (cropped): Whiskey5dja / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0
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