The embarkation evening, and why it is planned backwards
The evening before a sailing cannot slide, so it is planned from the boarding hour backwards rather than from dinner forwards.
Most evenings on a holiday absorb a late start. This one does not. There is a printed hour in the morning, a transfer that leaves without anyone it is waiting for, and a building full of other people checking out at the same time. Every decision about the evening has to be measured against that.
The order the numbers come in
Write down the hour the two of you must be standing somewhere with your cases. Subtract the transfer. Subtract a check-out that takes longer than it should. Subtract a night of sleep you will actually get rather than the one you are imagining. Whatever is left is the window a booking has to sit inside, and it is usually narrower than it looked from home.
What it does to length
Ninety minutes starting at half past eight finishes by ten and leaves a whole night behind it. Three hours starting at eleven finishes at two, and the two of you pay for it through the transfer and the first afternoon aboard. The house says so when the longer booking is asked for, and the page on the night before a cruise explains why a long booking belongs on the other end of the trip.
The cases are already packed
An embarkation evening has luggage standing in the room, often repacked twice. Push the cases to one wall before she arrives and the room works; leave them across the floor and it does not. The luggage guide is entirely about this.
It is always a deposit booking
A sailing date is known months ahead, so the booking is made more than twenty-four hours out, which puts half the fee in front of it as a matter of course. That is not a rule aimed at cruise couples; it is simply the rule they always meet first.