Beating The Jones Act

Our One-Time Getting Around The Jones Act

For a refresher on the Jones Act see Cruising and the Jones Act Here.

Back in 2016 we booked a back-to-back set of cruises with Celebrity. The first cruise was an Alaska cruise starting in Seattle and finishing in Vancouver. The second cruise continued on from Vancouver and finished in Honolulu. It took a little while but Celebrity came back and said we could not book this as it violated the Jones Act.

After reviewing the itineraries we realized that the Alaska cruise stopped in Victoria, Canada the day before arriving in Vancouver. We went back to Celebrity and asked that if we disembarked the ship in Victoria could we overnight there and rejoin the ship the next day in Vancouver therefore avoiding the Jones Act?

Asking a large organization with many layers of management to do something that hadn’t been considered before is usually a daunting task and this was no exception. Celebrity said they would look into it. Later when asked again Celebrity said they would look into it. Somewhat later when asked Celebrity said maybe it would be possible and they would get back to us. Following up on that hopeful news we were told probably not. Later we enlisted the help of our travel agent who got higher up the chain of command. The response she got was that they didn’t see why not but would look into it. A couple of months later Celebrity got back and said it was okay with them but that they needed to get permission from the Canadian Immigration.

Finally everything was cleared for us to stay on this back-to-back. We asked if we could just leave our things in the stateroom when we got off in Victoria? The response was – don’t ask and we won’t tell.

One interesting thing was that when we got off the ship in Victoria we were joined by eight other couples with some doing just what we were. Celebrity now has a process for accommodating cruisers wanting to do this back-toback.

Everything on this trip went very well. The one issue was a lack of planning on our part. We knew that a ferry went from Victoria to Vancouver at a nominal price but we failed to look up the actual terminal locations. It seems that the Vancouver Island terminal is a good distance outside of Victoria and the ferry docks a long way from Canada Place (the cruise ship dock) in Vancouver. Fortunately we found a bus service (The BC Connector) that left from only four blocks from our Victoria hotel, went onto the ferry and than delivered us right to Canada Place all for a reasonable fare.