Country: Denmark

Language: Danish

Currency: Danish Krone

Embarking and Disembarking:

I usually begin these guides with information about disembarking but as I’ve only sailed from this port once and it was the very first port, I have no experience of disembarking here. My cruise was with NCL.

Embarking was a chaotic experience. If you’ve never cruises before, it’s important to know that you get a specific time to check in and you’re expected to arrive at this time. The purpose of this is to avoid thousands of people arriving all at the same time.

I arrived at my allotted time and found there were some people arriving early who were being turned away, which isn’t unusual on busy sailings. The problem was they weren’t being turned away until they were in the terminal and in the queue. Which meant joining the queue was pure chaos.

When I finally managed to join the queue I looked for the priority check in, which I can use as a platinum member of NCLs loyalty programme. It was very difficult to make my way to that area. The set up of the terminal meant the check in for passengers with priority embarkation and more importantly, passengers with accessibility needs, was as far away from the entrance as possible. There were so many people spilling out from the regular embarkation queues, no one could get through. It just seemed like a bad set up that meant priority embarkation passengers were getting in the way of other passengers, disabled passengers were stuck in crowds, and all around there was just pure chaos.

I’m surprised they managed to get people on board, it was so disorganised. I cruise a lot and it’s always a bit chaotic but this was another level.

However, staff who checked me in were so nice and helpful that I quickly forgot about how poorly organised it was.

Public Transport

Copenhagen has really reliable public transport and you can get a bus to the port. It’s quite a walk from the city centre so it’s definitely good to have public transport. On days that the cruise ships are in port they also have hop on hop off buses from the cruise port.

Things to do:

However long your ship is docked, it won’t be long enough to experience even half of what Copenhagen has to offer. I only had one day there before the cruise and I’m already planning my next trip.

Copenhagen has river tours and bus tours, palaces, historic houses, museums, art galleries, theatres, a zoo, family attractions and it even has the second oldest amusement park in the world.

Autistic friendly?

Copenhagen itself is a pretty autistic friendly city. It’s clean, it’s relatively quiet compared to other cities, it’s walkable so you can avoid public transport, and the people are tolerant.

The cruise terminal itself is not at all autistic friendly. This may be different if it’s just a stop on your cruise rather than the embarkation port but I will avoid cruises that start here in the future. It was just too chaotic and overwhelming and I couldn’t get over disabled people having to fight their way through crowds to get to the accessible check in.