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Advice needed. Can you take your bike on a cruise ship?

Hello everyone. We are going away on a family holiday this summer with our friends - two families with young(ish) children. Our respective wives and children enjoy swimming and eating ice cream but my friend and I get bored with this after about 5 minutes! We are both avid cyclists (road and MTB) and usually manage to convince our families that a holiday with a company like Neilson is the best option (where they have bikes galore and a load of trails to explore). However, this year we are gonig to try cruising... which my mate and I are rather nervous about!!!! We are looking at travelling with Azamara cruise lines - some of the stops look truly amazing (Kotor in particular).  If we were able to take our road bikes on-board and stow them somewhere in their bike cases we could get some amazing rides during port stops. But so far nobody has been able to give us a definitive answer as to whether this is possible. Does anyone know of any cruise lines who actively allow this? Many thanks for any advice you might have! If we can make this work, we may have found a holiday that keeps everybody happy! Keep those cranks turning!

If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.

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JEMVisser | 1 year ago
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The boats I've been on, mostly shorter trips from germany or denmark to norway or sweden do allow bikes. While this isn't a full cruise, you can book an out and back ticket as a small cruise most often than not. I've been on stena line, fjord line or color line.

I think they should allow for bikes, even on an actual cruise, not one ment for going from point A to point B, that is, most cuise ships yes. Idk about Azamara.

My best bet is to contact your cruise line, or search online on their website, but since that probably didn't work just contact them directly. If your cruise ship has a car deck it will be of no problem having bikes onboard (bikes are always allowed on car decks in my experience) but idk on a azamara cruise. I've researched a bit and found that some cruise lines have bikes on board (e.g. Azamara) and rent them out at ports (just like you wanna ride a bit) but since you want to take your own nice road bike (I get that, I would want my own as well) on board it might be possible to store it with the other rent bikes.

Bikes are definitly not allowed on board the cruise ship itself, so you might need to board the ship through a different entrypoint than where all walking guests come one, probably via the car deck (I doubt it has one) or whatever they want you to do.

But after all, just ask the cruise line, there are no dumb questions!
Hope this helps.

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andy753 replied to JEMVisser | 1 year ago
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JEM - hello!  Thank you for your thoughts here. My frustration is that Azamara keep coming back with the same answer "you can take part in one of our cycling excursions" but completely miss the question about taking your own bike on-board. So I think the answer is sadly "no". AND I bet the bikes on-board are fold up types which weigh about as much as the ship!  SO that option doesn't really appeal!  If I find out anything else, I'll post an update. Good weekend!

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OldRidgeback replied to andy753 | 1 year ago
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Might be time to take the Brompton option? I appreciate they may not ride like the road bikes or MTBs you prefer, but they're probably a lot better to ride than the bicycle shaped objects the cruise ship is likely to have,

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mattw replied to JEMVisser | 1 year ago
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Consider the Hire Brompton option.

£5 a day from many places in the country, I believe.

I took one to Istanbul on an aeroplane flight.

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ktache replied to mattw | 1 year ago
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Or a Birdy. Though much rarer.

When I first read of the OPs dilemma I had a look if there were any airnimals for hire. But even buying them seems quite a specialised task.

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