We are set to cruise in @45 days. A few weeks back we went to our local county offices and had our passport cards ordered. This was just a drop in the bucket of @$200. (That was a sarcastic comment by the way.) Well, the other day I was chatting with a person in our cruise group that was telling me that she didn’t have a passport. I told her to quickly call Disney and verify the real answer. I then told her to give passport control a call to verify. What I have come to find is this… If you are on a closed-loop cruise you do not have to have a passport. A closed-loop cruise is any cruise that departs, and returns to the same port. What they do tell you is that you must have a passport book in order to leave the foreign locations if there is some sort of travel emergency and you need to fly out. Being that I will stay wherever I am if I am sick, or something I wasn’t getting the passport book. I got the passport card thinking that it was required to have some sort of passport. I also wouldn’t fly out simply because I wouldn’t have that kind of money laying around to pay for flights. Unless I am dying… I am not flying. (No… I am not afraid of flying.)
What I am actually finding from several people I talked to is that the cruise companies would rather you have a passport for many reasons, but having the passport also reduces their amounts of paperwork because of it being a major document. Well, now I am stuck having a passport, and being @$200 lighter on money. Isn’t life grand?
