What happens with my Schengen days when I board/alight a cruise in the UK without stamping my passport?

Question

I am UK resident who spends as much time in Schengen area (Tenerife) as I'm allowed. When we are not in Tenerife we often take cruises. I understand fully why if a cruise begins and ends in a Schengen country the whole cruise would count - however can anybody explain or confirm what happens when a cruise commences and ends in the UK and there are just a couple of days spent ashore on Schengen countries during the cruise?

This related answer mentions that the 90 days start as soon as my passport is stamped at the port of entry. As far as I can determine from the cruise company there are no procedures in place to submit passports for stamping either on arrival or departure. I assume they may submit some a passenger manifest, but how would I know if any days have been reduced from our 90 day limit?

Answer 1

I think the best course of action would be to contact the cruise company and clarify how this works (or wait for someone knowledgeable to answer on here).

I want to stress that I am not an expert, have never dealt with Schengen visas and just pieced this together from information online:

The Schengen Border Code has a part on cruise ships in Annex VI (article 3.2.1-3.2.3).

Article 3.2.3(a) states:

where the cruise ship comes from a port situated in a third country and calls for the first time at a port situated in the territory of a Member State, crew and passengers shall be subject to entry checks on the basis of the nominal lists of crew and passengers, ...

Passengers going ashore shall be subject to entry checks ...

That seems to suggest that your passport will be checked when you go ashore in a Schengen country, starting the Schengen "counter".

Article 3.2.3(d) states:

where a cruise ship departs from a port situated in a Member State to a port in a third country, crew and passengers shall be subject to exit checks on the basis of the nominal lists of crew and passengers.

This seems to suggest that exiting the Schengen area will be registered as well.

To determine how many days you have left on the 90 day limit on any given date, you can use the Schengen calculator and fill in the entry/exit date(s).

Answer 2

To follow on from the question of which days "count" towards the 90/180 on a cruise in and out of Southampton with day trip stops in the Schengen area, I was just advised by P & O Cruises that any day in a Schengen area port counts, whether you get off the ship or not.

Also any sea days that are between 2 ports of the same country also count. So for example if you were in Tenerife port one day then had sea day the next en route to, for example, Cadiz, then all three days would count: the Tenerife port stop, the Cadiz port stop and the sea day in-between.

However ... from personal experience on her own cruise, the P & O person I spoke to said there are no passport stamps at all. I asked them how anyone would know to count these days at all then...she advised well I assume as P & O have your passport number and the trip itinerary that this is recorded somewhere.

In this example, a 14 day trip, Southampton to Canaries including Portugal and mainland Spain and back to Southampton, I therefore calculated that 7 of the 14 days would count.

Maybe P & O or immigration somewhere record this ... no idea? I guess to be safe we should therefore count them but I'm struggling to see if there is an official system that does keep track of this with no stamps or scans of a passport.