Complete Pre-Cruise Requirements: Your Checklist Before You Sail

Article 10 of 13 in our Cruise Planning Guide — how to plan a cruise, one decision at a time.

You’ve picked your cabin, booked your excursions, and maybe even talked yourself into (or out of) the drink package. The cruise itself is locked in. But there’s one more stretch of planning between now and the ship’s horn sounding: the pre-cruise checklist, your final requirements before you sail. This is the paperwork-and-app stage of the trip, and it’s not glamorous, but getting it right early means embarkation day goes smoothly and nothing catches you off guard once you’re aboard.

Here’s everything we handle before we sail, in the order we handle it.

Confirm Your Passport and Visa Requirements

Start here, and start early. A passport is simply a must these days — just get it, if you don’t already have one.

The surprise for a lot of first-time cruisers is how often a passport is required even when the cruise doesn’t sound international. Cruises out of Seattle bound for Alaska are a perfect example: they sound like they’d stay entirely inside the U.S., but most of them call at Victoria or Vancouver, British Columbia along the way. Our take: A passport is strongly recommended, and required for anything other than a closed-loop sailing.

How Much Time Is Left on Your Documents

One more passport detail worth checking, and not just whether you have one: how much time is left on it. A lot of countries won’t let you in if your passport expires within six months of your travel dates, even if you’re only there for a day in port. This “six-month rule” trips up more travelers than you’d think, especially on itineraries that touch several countries with their own individual rules. Check the expiration date the day you book, not the week before you leave, so there’s actually time to renew if you need to.

One exception worth knowing, though it comes with a big asterisk: if your cruise is “closed-loop” — meaning it starts and ends at the same U.S. port, like most Seattle-to-Alaska sailings — U.S. citizens can technically get back into the country with just a government-issued photo ID and a birth certificate, no passport required. We still wouldn’t lean on that exception. If a medical issue, a missed ship, or anything else forces you to fly home from a foreign port instead of sailing back to where you started, a birth certificate won’t get you on that international flight. Bring the passport anyway.

Visas

Visas are rarer for U.S. citizens, but they do come up. When they’re needed, you can sometimes get one on arrival — Egypt is a good example, where a visa-on-arrival is available at the port. One important warning here: we would not recommend trying to arrange an Egypt visa ahead of time online. There are a lot of scam sites out there happy to take your money and your passport details for a visa you could have gotten in person for less hassle and less risk.

The bottom line, and we’ll say it plainly because it matters: visas are your responsibility, not the cruise line’s. The cruise line can offer general advice, but if you get your visa situation wrong, they take no responsibility for it, and the realistic outcome is being denied boarding. It’s a completely avoidable problem if you check requirements early and don’t leave it to the last minute.

Complete Online Check-In in the App

A huge amount of what used to be handled by cruise-line phone banks has moved online. On Princess, some steps can now only be completed through the Princess app — there’s no calling in or handling it at the terminal instead.

Here’s what the app is actually collecting from you:

• A photo of your passport (the physical document, not just typed-in data)
• A personal photo of yourself, used for scanning you on and off the ship all week
• Your credit card information, for onboard incidentals and embarkation-related charges
• Emergency contact information
• A handful of other smaller details

The good news is the app walks you through it step-by-step, and it gives you a clear finish line — a green checkmark or similar signal — once everything required is entered and accepted. If you’ve been putting this off because it feels like a mountain of paperwork, know that there’s a visible “you’re done” moment waiting for you at the end of it.

Locked Out Until You Pay Up

Here’s something we flagged back in How to Book Cruise Shore Excursions and promised to explain here: on some cruise lines, you can’t actually book shore excursions, spa treatments, or specialty dining through the app until your cruise fare is paid in full — regardless of what the calendar says the normal booking window should be. If you’ve already paid off your cruise before that window opens, you’ll never notice. But if you’re still making payments and the app shows everything locked, that’s usually why. It’s not a bug, and it’s not something you’re doing wrong. Check your line’s specific policy so it doesn’t catch you off guard.

Book Your Dining — And Coordinate It With the Show Times

Depending on the ship, you may need to set up both main dining room and specialty dining reservations through the app. Our sequencing tip: set up your specialty dining reservations first, then fill in the main dining room around them. It’s much easier to slot main dining nights into whatever’s left over once specialty dining is locked in, than to try to squeeze a specialty reservation into a schedule where the main dining room has already claimed the slot you wanted.

Specialty dining can sell out, and sometimes far out. We’ve had friends try to book a specialty restaurant as much as six months before a cruise and find nothing available. If that happens to you, don’t panic — see a maître d’ as soon as you board. Something has almost always opened up by then.

Here’s a detail worth building into your plan: coordinate your dinner time with the show time. On Princess there are two theater showtimes each night, typically 7:30 pm and 9:30 pm. If there’s a show you really want to see, pick your dinner seating with that in mind so you’re not rushing out mid-course or missing curtain entirely. And if one particular night’s dinner time conflicts with a show you want to catch, you don’t have to redo your whole week’s schedule — a maître d’ can move your dinner time for all nights, or just that one. One more tip: the show-going crowd tends to arrive early for good seats, so build in a little buffer, even though honestly, there really aren’t many bad seats in the theater.

The app also handles a few smaller personalization details: your preferred bed configuration (together or separate), and on some ships, even pillow-type selection. And of course, it will ask about food allergies and dietary needs. One realistic caveat, though: the waitstaff will almost certainly ask you about this again at the table, regardless of what you entered in the app. Don’t take that as a sign the system didn’t work — think of it as a backstop, not a replacement for speaking up in person.

Pack Smart: Your List, Your Dress Code, and What to Leave Behind

Start Early and Pack for Your Destination

Our own habit: we start laying things out in a spare bedroom about one to two weeks before we leave. It sounds excessive, but it means nothing gets forgotten in the last-minute scramble, and we can see the whole trip’s wardrobe at a glance before it goes in the suitcase.

What you actually need depends entirely on where you’re going and when. Warm-weather, beachy itineraries call for shorts, T-shirts, and bathing suits. Cooler-climate itineraries call for long pants, sweaters, and a rain jacket. Simple as that sounds, it’s the single biggest factor in what belongs in your suitcase.

A Few Last Calls Before You Go

A few quick tasks that are easy to forget in the packing rush. First, tell your bank and card issuer you’re traveling. Card companies flag international charges more often than you’d expect, and having your card frozen mid-cruise, right when you’re trying to settle your onboard folio, is a bad time to sort it out. A note in your bank’s app usually does it. Second, check what your phone carrier charges for calls and data at sea and in each country on your itinerary — before you go, not after the bill arrives. Most carriers offer a short-term international or cruise add-on you can turn on for the trip and back off once you’re home.

Third, sort your luggage tags ahead of time rather than the morning you leave. Depending on the line, you’ll either print them at home from the app or cruise documents, or pick up paper ones at the terminal. Princess, for one, lets you download and print yours from the app once check-in is complete. Do it a few days out — we cover what to actually do with the tags curbside in Cruise Embarkation Day Tips.

Fourth, if you take prescription medication, pack a few extra days’ worth beyond your return date in case of a delay, and keep it in its original, labeled containers in your carry-on, never checked luggage. For anything unusual or a controlled substance, it’s worth carrying a copy of the prescription or a short note from your doctor. You’ll probably never be asked for it, but if a customs officer or the ship’s medical staff ever does, having it in hand turns a stressful moment into a two-minute one.

If you’d like something more detailed than “pack for the weather” to jog your memory on the smaller stuff, a few reputable sites publish full cruise packing checklists worth a look: Cruise Critic’s printable packing list is probably the most recognized name in the cruising community, and Cruzely’s 85-item printable checklist is a thorough, cruise-specific option if you want something exhaustive. Either one is a good starting point to check against your own list.

What to Wear: Smart Casual v. Formal Night

This might be the single most-asked question we hear about cruising, and it causes a surprising amount of anxiety for something that turns out to be pretty relaxed in practice.

Most nights aboard fall under what Princess calls Smart Casual: for men, trousers and a collared shirt; for women, a dress, a skirt or trousers with a blouse, or any polished casual outfit. Then there are formal nights — Princess brands theirs “Dress to Impress” — where some guests go all out in tuxedos, dark suits, or evening gowns. Shorter cruises usually have one formal night; longer ones, like our own 21-night transatlantic on the Sun Princess, have more — ours has three.

Here’s the part that should put you at ease: formal is genuinely optional. We don’t go for full formal ourselves, and it has never once been a problem. On a formal night, we typically wear khaki pants with a dressier shirt and, sometimes, a nice vest. That’s it. People dress up as much or as little as they want, and everyone enjoys their evening their own way. We’ve even seen guests wear nice, “couture-type” jeans to a formal dinner, often paired with a casual sport jacket, and nobody blinked.

The only real rule to keep in mind for the main dining room and specialty restaurants: skip the swimsuits, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Save those for the buffet, where the dress code stays casual every night of the cruise — so if formal wear really isn’t your thing, you’re never actually locked out of a good meal.

What Not to Pack

Every cruise line maintains a list of prohibited and restricted items, and while the specifics vary a bit line to line, the categories are consistent across the industry:

• Fire hazards: irons, candles, incense, hot plates, coffee makers, kettles, and heating pads are banned outright on most ships. Fire is the single most dangerous hazard on a ship at sea, so cruise lines are strict about anything that generates heat or an open flame.
• Weapons and sharp objects: firearms, ammunition, fireworks, knives, and weapon replicas are not allowed. Most lines make an exception for small personal grooming items like nail clippers.
• Drugs and illegal substances: banned regardless of what’s legal at your departure port or destination, including marijuana and CBD products, even with a prescription.
• Extension cords and power strips without surge protection, along with most hand and power tools.
• Excess alcohol: most lines allow one bottle of wine or Champagne per adult on embarkation day (some, like Princess, charge a corkage fee if you drink it outside your cabin); anything beyond your line’s limit is typically held and returned at the end of the cruise.
• Drones and remote-controlled devices, which can interfere with the ship’s own operations.

This list is a good general guide, but it’s not gospel for every line. Check your own cruise line’s specific prohibited-items page before you pack, since policies do shift and vary by line.

Your Pre-Cruise Checklist at a Glance

• Check your passport is valid at least six months past your trip, and get any visas your ports require
• Complete online check-in in your cruise line’s app
• Book specialty dining first, then main dining around it, with show times in mind (and note any dietary needs)
• Tell your bank you’re traveling, and check your phone plan’s international and at-sea rates
• Print or download your luggage tags a few days before you leave
• Start packing early, for your actual destination and season
• Pack a couple of dressier outfits for formal night, but don’t stress, since formal is optional
• Keep medications in your carry-on, in their original containers, with a few extra days’ worth
• Check your cruise line’s prohibited-items list

Frequently Asked Questions

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Next up in the guide: Cruise Embarkation Day Tips. Or head back to the full Cruise Planning Guide to pick up wherever you left off.