Fort Lauderdale to Copenhagen Transatlantic Cruise – 2016

We are planning another Transatlantic Cruise from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Copenhagen, Denmark aboard the Regal Princess.  The cruise will be 14 days in duration, starting on April 17, 2016 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and ending on May 1, 2016 in Copenhagen, Denmark.  We will then stay an additional 3 nights in Copenhagen to explore this city, we have never been to Denmark before in our travels.  We will fly home from Copenhagen on Wednesday, May 4, 2016.

This will be our 5th Transatlantic Cruise, and the second going from west to east.  In addition to Copenhagen, other than Ponta, Delgada in the Azores, we have never visited the other ports of call on this cruise. It will be nice to see some new places and that was one of the reasons we chose this particular cruise.

We will also be flying down to Ft. Lauderdale in stead of our normal drive there since this cruise is one-way, and we need to fly home.  We looked at driving a rental car and dropping it off at the Ft. Lauderdale Airport on Disembarkation Day, but the cost of the one-way rental car, a hotel room for Saturday night because we can’t make the entire 10 hour drive on the day we depart, and the cost of gas was about the same as flying, and getting there in about 3.5 hours.

Flying is not that easy either since we have a 5:45 AM flight out, so it will be an early morning to get to the airport for that departure time.  We are leaving early so we have at least one other flight out that morning to our connecting airport in Atlanta if something goes wrong with the pre-dawn flight.  Once we make it to Atlanta, there are flights leaving every hour to Ft. Lauderdale, so there is some insurance we can get to the port before our 4:00 PM cruise departure if there is a flight problem.  The hourly flights to Ft. Lauderdale  also gives us some “lost luggage” back up, assuming our bags get to Atlanta form our home airport in South Carolina.  Our current arrival time in Ft. Lauderdale is 9:36 AM, so we should have plenty of time.

The day of cruise flight departure was our only concern since once we leave Ft. Lauderdale, the ship does not stop at any ports for six days as we cross the Atlantic Ocean to the Azores, our first port of call.  If for some reason we, or our luggage, don’t make it to Ft. Lauderdale, we are out of luck on getting on the ship.  However, we have done the same early day of cruise departure for another cruise that left out of Los Angeles, so it is certainly not that much of a risk, other than we could have gotten on the ship the following day in Santa Barbara had we had issues making it for that cruise.

Here is our Itinerary: