Taking a few days out from a cruise
 

We're going on a fortnight's cruise. However it goes fairly close to another area we want to travel to and we'd like to leave the boat for a couple of days and catch it up later on to enable us to see more of the area we want.

Anyone have any experience of the best way to approach this?

Thanks.

In principle, this should be little different from voluntarily getting off a ship before the end of a cruise, which I have assisted others to do from time to time. The key is communication - make sure the ship knows what you're doing and that they're OK with it. If you need to make travel arrangements in advance to get from one port to the other, then you probably need to liaise with the cruise line before the cruise. You don't want to just disappear, otherwise you'll end up inconveniencing the ship when they think you've gone missing and missed a departure.

The only problem that I can think of off the top of my head depends on where you're thinking of doing this. If your trip might put the ship in violation of an anti-cabotage law (like the laws relating to coastwise traffic in the US), then they might object because they could be fined for the violation - as happens when people get off non-US flagged ships having only travelled from one US port to another without calling at a non-US port.

If you are using a travel agent, they can make the arrangements with the cruise line, if you are using the cruise line directly you can contact them. People do this from time to time, and it's usually not a problem. The only issues, as noted above, is if it involved customs and immigration, but that would totally depend on where you get off and back on.

Don't ask for a fare reduction though, that won't happen for the days you are not there.

Thanks for the advice. I have contacted the cruise line and will let you know how we get on with the query.

For information on how we got on with our query:

Our cruise line came back (eventually) and told us that we couldn't leave the ship. We had hoped to leave it in India for a few days but customs and immigration there apparently won't allow it.