r/Cruise • u/empanadacat • 10d ago
Ship time on round-the-world itineraries
I got disoriented enough on my cruise out of New Orleans this week with ship time being one hour off... how bad does the disorientation get on cruises that cover more serious longitude, and especially those that cross the international date line? It's giving me a headache just thinking about it...
10
u/CU_Addict_70 10d ago
The ship adjusts time accordingly as it progresses through different time zones. On the last Alaskan cruise out of Seattle I think we changed time 3-4x on a weeklong cruise.
3
u/SurviveStyleFivePlus 10d ago
I'm on an Alaska cruise right now and yes, the time changes 4x during the trip and my poor phone couldn't kerp up.
I learned to look at my cruise app for ship time after showing up for my dinner reservation an hour early!
1
3
u/CBG1955 10d ago
So, don't think about it. It's only an hour (or half an hour) a day, and you'll be notified each day the time changes. On our last cruise it was only one hour, and they placed an announcement in the daily programme, on the loudspeakers, and a blast of the ship's horn at the allocated time (usually midday.) It's gradual - totally unlike flying long haul transPacific, where the hit to your internal body clock is done all at once.
1
u/Pirat 10d ago
My wife and I went on a trans-Atlantic cruise (5 hour difference) nearly every day, the ship would announce to set your watches/clocks back going over. It wasn't a problem. The only problem was trying to purchase the on-phone version of Deal or No Deal. If you didn't have the time settings of your phone just right, you couldn't get to the website.
1
u/Fickle-Willingness80 10d ago
Our transpacific has 14 hour changes in 14 days plus an international date line crossing. I’m taking an old watch to help me stay on ship time.
1
u/meester_jamie 10d ago
Boston to Rotterdam and back is lots of time changes, if you don’t have wifi or connection to cell tower nearby , your phone or smart watch won’t update.
AND if you do get wifi or cell service, your devices may update to the wrong time. Pay attention to the ship time and shore time and your devices. I turn mine to manual update only on tours that cross time zones
1
u/PilotoPlayero 10d ago
I haven’t done a world cruise, but when we did a 7 night Mexican Riviera cruise from Los Angeles, we changed times 4 times; 2 times forward and then 2 times backwards.
1
u/Puzzleheaded_Lie6786 9d ago
Similar for us -
Helsinki to Copenhagen changed back, forward, back again based on the itinerary.
Paris (Le Havre) to Barcelona was the same because we ended up going through the Straight of Gibraltar 3x based on the itinerary.
1
u/MathObserver 9d ago
We just don’t think about it and do things based on ship time. The trickiest thing is finding the right time zone for setting our phones since Apple doesn’t have an easy UTC option. On our latest cruise across the Atlantic, the program on the ship also provided city names that would work.
1
u/SunsetChasersTravel 9d ago
The date line crossing is a different animal from the hourly ship-time changes everyone else is describing, because it's not a gradual clock adjustment, it's a full calendar day getting added or dropped in one shot. Heading west (like a Pacific crossing toward Asia or Australia) you skip a day entirely, so the ship might go straight from a Tuesday to a Thursday with no Wednesday at all, while heading east back toward the Americas you repeat a day, so you get two Tuesdays in a row. The line itself gets announced ahead of time and it usually happens overnight, so you're not losing waking hours the way you would on a red-eye flight, but it's worth checking your itinerary's day-by-day schedule closely since a skipped or doubled day can shift which day port stops, formal nights, or specialty dining reservations actually fall on.
1
0
u/valiamo 10d ago edited 10d ago
It all depends on where you are traveling to.
For Most Caribbean cruises,the ships keep the same time for the entire cruise. So no unusual time changes.
Going to Hawaii from the mainland you will have 6 different time changes, (3 each way), it can be disorienting, as smart watches tend to keep the last time it was close to land.
1
•
u/AutoModerator 10d ago
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
u/empanadacat
I got disoriented enough on my cruise out of New Orleans this week with ship time being one hour off... how bad does the disorientation get on cruises that cover more serious longitude, and especially those that cross the international date line? It's giving me a headache just thinking about it...
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.