Cruise Port Schedule

What a cruise port schedule tells you

A cruise port schedule is simply the list of which ships are calling at a given port on a given day, with each one's arrival and departure time. Port authorities and cruise lines publish these to coordinate berths, customs staffing, tenders and shore excursions, but the published version is usually a dense PDF organized by terminal, not by the date or port a traveler actually cares about. This site pulls those published schedules apart and re-organizes them by port, so you can see which cruise ships are in port today, or on any other date, without hunting through a terminal-by-terminal document.

Every sailing shown here is sourced, not estimated. Where a port has a published schedule, the ship name, cruise line, terminal and times come directly from that source, and the source is named on the port's own page. Where a port doesn't have a published schedule we've sourced yet, the page says so plainly instead of guessing a time that could send someone to the wrong terminal at the wrong hour.

Homeport turnaround vs. port of call

Cruise ports fall into two shapes. A homeport is where a cruise starts and ends: passengers from the previous sailing disembark in the morning, the crew cleans and restocks the ship through the day, and a new set of passengers boards for departure that same afternoon. Port Canaveral and Miami, the two busiest cruise ports in the world, run several of these turnarounds most days. A port of call is a stop partway through someone else's itinerary: the ship arrives, stays for several hours while passengers go ashore, then continues to its next port. The schedule tables on this site mark port-of-call stops separately from homeport turnarounds, since the two mean very different things if you're trying to meet a ship or plan an excursion around it.

Typical cruise port schedule timing

Most homeport turnarounds follow a similar rhythm: arrival in the early morning, often 6:00 to 7:30 AM, and departure in the mid-to-late afternoon, often 3:30 to 5:30 PM. That window gives the crew time to fully turn the ship around between one set of passengers and the next. A port-of-call stop usually runs longer during daylight hours, since the whole point is giving passengers a full day ashore. None of this is a guarantee for any specific sailing: weather, mechanical delays, and knock-on effects from a previous port can shift a published time, sometimes with only a day or two of notice. Treat the schedule as the plan, and if you're meeting someone off a ship or timing a pickup, check again close to the date.

Using a schedule to plan a pickup or excursion

The published arrival time is when a ship is due at the port, not when passengers actually walk off. Disembarkation for a homeport turnaround usually starts an hour or so after arrival, once the ship clears customs and immigration, and can take another hour or two to work through everyone on board, so a pickup timed to the exact arrival time often means a wait. Boarding works the other direction: cruise lines set their own boarding cutoff, printed on your boarding pass or in your cruise documents, commonly 60 to 90 minutes before the ship's scheduled departure. Arriving well ahead of your assigned check-in window rarely gets you on board faster, since terminals stagger arrivals to manage the security line, but arriving after the cutoff risks missing the ship entirely. If you're booking a shore excursion around a port-of-call stop, the gap between arrival and departure on the schedule is the real window you have ashore, minus the time it takes to tender or walk off the ship at the start and get back aboard before the cutoff at the end.

How AIS-based ship tracking works

A live "ship tracker," in the sense most people mean it, reads AIS (Automatic Identification System) signals. Ships over a certain size are required to broadcast their position, speed and heading every few seconds; coastal stations and satellites pick up the signal and relay it to tracking sites. Reception is good near shore and gets patchier well out at sea, which is why some live trackers estimate a mid-ocean ship's position from its recent course and speed rather than a fresh signal. This site doesn't yet plot live AIS positions; it publishes sourced sailing schedules by port, which tells you when a ship is due rather than exactly where it is right now. Real-time position tracking is planned as a future addition once we have a reliable feed for it.

Cruise port schedule coverage, port by port

Every port in the directory gets its own page, whether or not we have a sourced schedule for it yet: major Florida ports (Port Canaveral, Miami, Port Everglades, Port Tampa Bay, Key West), Gulf Coast ports (Galveston, New Orleans), the Alaska season's main stops (Juneau, Ketchikan), the Pacific homeports (Seattle, San Diego), and Nassau in the Bahamas, one of the most-visited ports of call in the Caribbean. Port Canaveral, Miami and Port Tampa Bay currently have full, sourced sailing schedules; the rest have a reference page covering the port itself, with a sourced schedule to follow as we add it. Check the ports index for the full list and each page's current status, browse by cruise line instead of by port, see which ships are actually the largest cruise ships in the world or how they compare line by line if you're trying to place a name you saw on a schedule, look up a deck plan for one of them, or watch a port live on one of our cruise ship webcams.