In our previous article – we looked at how to eliminate queues at the cruise terminal during passenger check-in. Today we continue that thread, focusing on two topics:
- how boarding cards are distributed
- how the disembarkation process works
Boarding cards: more than just a ticket
Most people reading this already know what a boarding card is, but let’s quickly outline what it actually does. Much like at an airport, you need one to board the ship – but on a cruise, it does considerably more. It’s your entry pass, your onboard wallet, and your cabin key, all in one. For the duration of the cruise, it’s the most important piece of plastic in your pocket.
The standard format is credit-card-sized, though digital alternatives are becoming more common. For now, however, most cruise lines still rely on classic plastic boarding cards with RFID technology.
When and where to print them?
Once you decide to issue physical boarding cards, the next question is when and where to print them. The honest answer is: it depends. There’s no single right approach – the process has to fit your operation. Below are the main options, along with their practical consequences.
Print a few days before the cruise
The passenger list is usually locked a few days before departure. Last-minute additions happen, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. From an operational standpoint, printing several thousand boarding cards before the new cruise begins makes a lot of sense. Everything is prepared in advance, and if something goes wrong, there’s still time to fix it.
It also limits the infrastructure you need on the day itself – a set of RFID printers in one place rather than distributed across the terminal. A bulk print run of a few thousand cards will likely take several hours and keep two people occupied, but that’s a reasonable price for peace of mind on embarkation day.
Print at the Cruise Terminal
The alternative is printing each card at the moment a passenger is checked in. Instead of one concentrated print run days before, you break it into thousands of small micro-processes distributed across the check-in window.
Personally, I’m not a fan of this approach. It adds another potential point of failure to a process that already needs to run smoothly under time pressure. It also means deploying multiple RFID printers across the terminal – at every check-in counter and self-service station. These printers aren’t cheap, they require regular maintenance, and hardware has a habit of failing at the worst possible moment.
How do passengers actually receive their cards?
Printing is only half the equation. Here are the main distribution options
Cards waiting in the cabin
This is my preferred option. After the pre-print run, the housekeeping team places cards in the relevant cabins – either inside, or in a sealed envelope at the door. Passengers head straight to their cabin after boarding to pick them up, which can be neatly combined with the mandatory safety drill: the passenger collects their card, grabs their life jacket, and makes their way to the muster station.
The beauty of this approach is its simplicity – no technology required. The main constraint is cabin readiness. Not every cabin is cleaned and ready before the first passengers come aboard, and no cruise line wants to send a guest to an unprepared cabin.
One practical note: some cruise lines require passengers to show a pass at the gangway or security before they receive their cabin card. This is easy to solve – a simple QR code ticket or a temporary paper receipt with a QR code works perfectly well as an interim solution.
Distribution at the terminal
If cards are pre-printed, they still need to get to passengers at the terminal. Two ways to handle this:
The simpler option is a dedicated card collection point – or several, organized by deck – where passengers go after completing check-in, regardless of which path they took (counter, self-service kiosk, or otherwise). No technology required, straightforward to implement.
The more elegant option – and the one I prefer – is delivering the card to the passenger at the exact point where check-in is completed. When a passenger is checked in, the system fires an event to whoever manages card distribution. That person sees which cabin was just checked in and at which station, retrieves the right card, and brings it over. It eliminates the secondary queue at the collection point and removes a meaningful source of terminal chaos.
Mail the cards in advance
For cruise lines that can lock the passenger list several weeks out, mailing cards directly to passengers’ homes is theoretically possible. In practice, it creates logistical complexity, generates cost, and introduces risk: cards get lost in the post, passengers forget to bring them, and you still need a full fallback printing capability on embarkation day. I wouldn’t recommend this path.
What about the phone in my pocket?
The more tech-minded reader is probably already asking: why physical cards at all, when most smartphones support NFC? It’s a fair question, and it’s absolutely the direction the industry should be moving toward. Technically, there are no blockers. The real constraint is budget – specifically, the investment required to upgrade cabin door locks across an entire fleet. For children, physical cards and wristbands will also remain the primary option for the foreseeable future, for safety reasons.
Disembarkation
Disembarkation tends to get less attention than embarkation, but it matters just as much operationally – because in most cases, new passengers can’t begin boarding until the ship is fully cleared. The process is structurally simpler than embarkation, but it still needs to run efficiently.
Outstanding payments
Passengers with unsettled onboard accounts are typically flagged at the gangway on the final day. This creates bottlenecks and unnecessary stress for everyone involved. In a well-designed process, this situation should be detected well in advance – ideally prevented entirely through mandatory credit card pre-authorization at the time of booking or check-in. We’ll cover the full payment management process in a dedicated episode.
Luggage handling
Passengers’ luggage has to leave the ship too. On turnaround day, corridors are busy and space is tight, so most cruise lines encourage passengers to hand their bags over to the crew for transport rather than carrying them off personally.
Nobody enjoys lost luggage – I’ve experienced it myself more times than I care to count at airports. Beyond building a solid physical transfer process, transparency matters enormously here. Passengers should know exactly what will happen to their bag, when it will leave the ship, and where they can collect it. We’ll dedicate a full episode to luggage transfer processes – both on and off the ship.
Passengers
How disembarkation actually works depends heavily on the destination.
In Europe and the Schengen area, leaving the ship at the end of a voyage is effectively no different from stepping off in any port of call during the cruise. Simple and fast.
In destinations with immigration controls, it becomes considerably more complex. The US is the clearest example: disembarkation there is tightly regulated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and every passenger must go through a face check before clearing the terminal.
This process can be automated through self-service biometric stations – facial recognition kiosks that passengers move through independently. CBP typically operates its own systems, but cruise lines can also integrate this step into their own terminal infrastructure via TVS (Traveler Verification Service), keeping ownership of the full experience.
Even with a highly efficient system in place, several thousand passengers appearing at once will generate queues. The solution isn’t a faster process – it’s better grouping and communication. Passengers waiting their turn are far more comfortable doing so over a final coffee on the ship than standing in a terminal queue. A clear, timely notification – via the cruise line’s app and/or SMS – telling each passenger their departure window goes a long way. And as I mentioned in the previous episode: frame it in the language of benefits. Successful communication between ship and passenger is where the whole process either holds together or falls apart.
In the next episode, we’ll focus on luggage transfer – what happens to bags between the moment they leave the cabin and the moment passengers collect them on the other side.
If any of these challenges sound familiar, or you’d like to go deeper on any of them – we’d be happy to talk: hello@codefit.dev.