Princess Cays Cruise Port Guide

Almost always a sea day. Princess Cays sits roughly seventy miles from anywhere with spare berth capacity, and a ship that cannot land its tenders has nowhere booked to go instead, so a same-day cancellation usually just becomes time at sea. Substitutions do happen, but at the planning stage rather than on the morning - after the 2019 fire ashore, for instance, one Carnival ship was rerouted to Half Moon Cay well in advance. Any shore excursion you booked through the ship is refunded automatically to your folio; port taxes and fees are a separate matter and lines have grown less generous about those, so check your own line's terms rather than assuming.

You can get remarkably close to it, but you cannot go. Disney's Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point opened in 2024 on the same southern tip of Eleuthera, about two miles away and connected by road, which makes this the only place in the Bahamas where two rival cruise lines' private destinations share one headland. It is open to Disney guests only. The practical consequence is about the pink sand: the famous Lighthouse Beach sits inside that footprint, so the old advice about grabbing a taxi out to it no longer works the way the internet says it does. If pink sand is your goal, the dune buggy excursion is now the reliable route to it.

Once, memorably. A fire late one night in January 2019 destroyed four buildings - the generator house, the reverse-osmosis water plant, the mechanic's shop, and a tool shed - with no guests ashore and nobody hurt. Stops were diverted while power and water were restored, and guest facilities were largely untouched apart from restrooms. The detail worth taking from it is what actually burned: this is a leased strip of a quiet island that makes its own electricity and its own fresh water, which is precisely why the advice to bring everything ashore with you is not fussiness.

Possibly not, and Princess Cays is the sharpest version of this problem because there is no pier to fall back on. Princess's published policy is that guests using mobility devices will not be transferred into or out of a tender where lifting beyond set limits would be required; instead you transfer to a ship's wheelchair operated by crew, and the decision rests with the Captain, who can decline on sea state alone even while walking passengers go ashore. Once you are on the sand the resort itself is reasonable, with paved paths from the marina. The barrier here is the boat, not the island - so speak to the accessibility desk early in the cruise rather than on the morning.

This guide draws on the official institutions below, cross-checked against current cruise schedules and traveler reports.

• PORT AUTHORITYPrincess Cruises — Princess Cays (private resort, Eleuthera) · princess.com
• TOURISMBahamas Ministry of Tourism, Investments & Aviation · bahamas.com
• GOVERNMENTGovernment of The Bahamas · bahamas.gov.bs

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