Port Day Guide and Port Day Score

Every cruise port day on an itinerary now shows a Port Day Score, a quick read on how smooth that stop is likely to be. Open the Port guide on the day for the timeline, the ships in port, the weather and any travel advisories. Sea days and days with no time ashore do not get a score.

Your clients see the score too. The score and guide appear on the shared itinerary link and in the JourneyFuse app, where each upcoming port day shows the score and be-back-by time and a Port guide button opens the full guide. The app keeps it with the trip, so it still opens without signal ashore. A few notes are for you only and are never shown to clients (see below).

The score

The score is a number out of 20, built from four parts, each scored 1 to 5 (which is why the lowest possible total is 4):

• Getting ashore: how easy it is to get off the ship and into town. Tender ports start higher. At a tender port, swell of 1.5 m or more adds 1 and 2.5 m or more adds 2. At a docked port, 5 or more ships sharing the terminal adds 1 for lines getting off.
• Crowds: how many guests are ashore from every ship in port that day, in bands of under 5,000, under 10,000, under 16,000, under 24,000 and 24,000 or more.
• Conditions: heat (feels like 92°F or more, or 100°F or more), a 60% or higher chance of rain while guests are ashore, and wind of 30 km/h or more. A tropical storm nearby sets Conditions straight to 5.
• Return risk: how many hours guests have before all aboard, whether it is a tender port, whether it is a busy day (Crowds 4 or 5), and any travel advisory.

The total falls into one of four bands:

Typical vs this sailing

The guide shows what the port is typically like and what this sailing looks like. A port that is usually easy can score higher on your sailing date because three other ships are in, the swell is up for a tender port, or a storm is forecast. Crowds from other ships, swell at tender ports, heat, rain and wind, storms and serious advisories are what move the score from the typical number.

Be back by

The guide gives a be back by time so clients know when to be at the ship, not just when the ship leaves. It is worked out like this:

1. Start with all aboard, which is 30 minutes before the ship departs (60 minutes for Disney).
2. Subtract a 60-minute buffer.
3. Subtract another 30 minutes for tender ports, where boats shuttle guests back.
4. Subtract another 30 minutes on busy days, when Crowds scores 4 or higher.

If there is no time ashore, the be-back-by line is left out.

Where the information comes from

• Port times and ships in port: our own cruise schedules.
• Your ship and cruise line: the ship on the cruise day, or the ship and cruise line on the cruise booking it is linked to. This is how the guide marks your ship among the ships in port and knows when Disney's 60-minute all aboard applies.
• Weather: Open-Meteo. Inside 14 days we use the forecast. Further out we use climate averages for that date.
• Swell: Open-Meteo Marine, which matters most at tender ports.
• Storms: National Hurricane Center (NHC) storms active right now and within 300 nautical miles of the port. We only check when the port day is within the next 5 days.
• Travel advisories: US State Department, UK FCDO and Government of Canada, refreshed nightly. Only level 3 (adds 1) and level 4 (adds 2) change Return risk. Lower levels are shown in the guide but do not change the score.

Notes you may see

• Ship traffic not available for this date. We do not have a schedule for other ships that day, so Crowds is left out of the score and the other three parts are scaled up to a total out of 20.
• Port times not published yet. The cruise line has not released arrival and departure times, so there is no be-back-by time and the timeline is blank until they appear.
• Storm data not available. The storm lookup could not be reached, so the score does not include a storm check.

Advisor-only notes

Some notes are written for you, for example that a figure is based on typical data or that a source was unavailable. These show in the guide while you are logged in and are never shown to clients on the shared link.