Category: Fort Lauderdale

Two sentences render on the Port Everglades parking map and 2,229 characters wait behind a click

Broward County publishes its cruise map at porteverglades.net/parking-custom-map, and the page renders 171 characters of its own text: a heading and one 27 word sentence. The eight terminal records that answer the question, 2,229 characters of address, cruise line, parking and entrance, load only when a shape on the drawing is clicked.

The Port Everglades parking map is a county web page pairing each of eight cruise terminals, at a seaport 1.8 miles from the airport, with a garage or lot. That gap is the whole story of the page. A driver who opens it, reads what is on screen and leaves has read “Find Terminal Parking” and a single instruction to select a terminal. A driver who clicks a building gets an address, a cruise line, a parking assignment, sometimes a drop-off order and, twice out of eight, the nearest gate.

There is a second surprise underneath. Port Everglades also publishes a conventional drawn map of the whole seaport, with a legend, street names and the security checkpoints on it, and files it under a different label in a different menu. Everything below was read from Broward County pages, files and markup in September 2026 and checked again on October 7, 2026.

Component of the Port Everglades parking map page	What Broward County ships	What loads before anyone clicks
Standing page copy	The heading “Find Terminal Parking” plus one 150 character sentence, printed once for desktop and once for mobile	All 171 characters of it
Desktop drawing of the port	One inline vector drawing, 1440 by 800 units, 328 drawn shapes, no text element anywhere in it	The picture, with every label drawn as letter outlines
Mobile drawing of the port	A second inline drawing, 890 by 800 units, also 328 shapes, with one extra ocean label layer	The picture only, on the same terms
Eight cruise terminal records	1,477 characters of address, cruise line, parking assignment, drop-off order and closest entrance	Nothing until a building is clicked
Eight repeated alerts	The same 94 character sentence attached eight times, 752 characters in total	Nothing, and the wording differs from the sentence on screen
Eight route animations	Looping image files, 500 by 375 pixels each, 266 frames and 376,173 bytes across the eight	Nothing until a building is clicked
Outbound links	One link per record to the matching Port Everglades terminal page, 8 of 8	Nothing, and none of those 8 terminal pages links back

Broward County labels two downloads Port Map, and neither one is the interactive page

Open the Cruise menu on any Port Everglades cruise page and an item called Port Map sits directly under the eight terminals and the Cruise Guide. It does not open the interactive page. In September 2026 it downloaded a PDF of 326,025 bytes whose file name read Port Facility Guide FINAL August 8 2023; on October 7, 2026 the same item, on every page read, downloads the newer drawing instead.

A second link carrying the same Port Map label sits on the port guides and publications page, and opens that same newer drawing: an Adobe Illustrator file of 1,303,753 bytes, served as application/illustrator, whose drawing prints the title PORT FACILITIES, the stamp Update 03-19-2026 and the job number PO202698062. It is the newer revision of the same map, in a format a phone will not display.

Both drawings carry an identical legend of 23 categories, and it is the legend a cruise passenger wants: BERTHS, CRANE, RAILROAD, HARBORMASTER TOWER, CRUISE TERMINALS, GRID, ICTF YARD, BROWARD CO. BUILDINGS, FEDERAL/STATE BUILDINGS, PARKING – SURFACE LOT, PARKING – HERON GARAGE, PARKING – PALM GARAGE, CELL PHONE LOT, CEMENT, DINING, SHOPPING/GROCERY, GAS, HOTELS, CASH MACHINE, PHARMACY, HOSPITAL, PUBLIC VIEWING and SECURITY CHECKPOINT, with a footnote that automatic defibrillators are located in all cruise terminals.

One line on that drawing exists nowhere else on the Broward County site. The facilities map prints two exit numbers at the port approach, Exit 12A marked to the airport and Exit 12B marked to Port Everglades. The Getting Here page stops one junction upstream, sending I-95 southbound to Exit 26, I-95 northbound to Exit 24, I-75 to Exit 19 and Florida’s Turnpike to Exit 54, and never names the exit that puts a car at the gate.

Document Broward County publishes for Port Everglades	Where the link to it sits	Format and size as the server delivers it	Date the document itself carries	Best for
Port Facility Guide	The Port Map item in the Cruise menu in September 2026; no page read on October 7, 2026 links it	PDF, 326,025 bytes	August 8 2023, inside the file name	Reading the whole seaport to scale on a phone, at the cost of a tenant list three years old
Port Everglades Facilities Map	A tile labelled Port Map on the port guides and publications page and, by October 7, 2026, the Port Map item in the Cruise menu	Adobe Illustrator file, 1,303,753 bytes, served as application/illustrator	Update 03-19-2026, printed on the drawing	The current revision, for anyone with software that opens it
Find Terminal Parking, the interactive page	A button on the cruise parking page, two clicks from the Cruise menu	Web page, 114 KB, nothing to download	16 January 2025, in the port’s own sitemap	Matching one terminal number to a garage, a cruise line and a drop-off order

What the Port Everglades map draws, layer by layer, in its own markup

The drawing is more generous than the two sentences beside it suggest. Its 328 shapes are grouped into named layers, and the names describe a working port map: 17 shapes for the road network, 61 for the street labels, 18 for the legend, and separate groups for Parking Lot A, Parking Lot B and Parking Lot C at four shapes each, and none for Parking Lot D, the 850 space lot the parking page lists beside Cruise Terminal 18 on October 7, 2026. The Heron label takes 21 shapes and the Palm label 20, which pairs the drawing with the Port Everglades parking facilities and the $25.00 daily maximum they share.

Three more layers draw things the cruise parking page never names. A cell phone lot group of 15 shapes marks a waiting area that only the Arriving and Departing page describes in words. An airport callout of 22 shapes points at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, 1.8 miles away. And the two largest lettering groups on the entire drawing, at 32 and 30 shapes, are labelled BCC garage and BCC in the markup: the convention center and its garage get more drawn letters than either cruise garage.

None of that lettering is text. Neither drawing contains a single text element, title element or accessibility label, so the street names, the legend and the garage names are all letter-shaped outlines. Nothing on the map can be searched, copied or read aloud, which is why the terminal numbers behind the eight Port Everglades cruise terminals and the garages assigned to them have to be carried in from somewhere else.

Two details in the interactive layer reward a closer look. Nine shapes sit in the clickable target group and only eight carry a terminal identifier, so one hit area on the map opens nothing. And Cruise Terminal 2 is the only building given an active state rather than a hover state, which makes it the record the page opens on, whichever ship a visitor came to look up.

Eight route animations are the only turn by turn Port Everglades publishes

Each record carries a looping animation of the drive from the gate to the parking, and Broward County publishes no written directions from a checkpoint to a garage anywhere on its site. Between them they run 266 frames and 36.6 seconds between them, weigh 376,173 bytes, and measure 500 by 375 pixels apiece. Seven were created on 25 November 2024 and the eighth, Cruise Terminal 18, on 10 January 2025.

Their titles are where the map argues with itself. Five name the same facility the record names in words, and three do not.

Cruise terminal record on the Port Everglades map	Title the record gives its animation	Frames and running time	Parking the same record names in words	Do the two agree
Cruise Terminal 2	Terminal 2 Heron	43 frames, 5.9 seconds	Parking in the Heron Garage	Yes, both name the Heron Garage
Cruise Terminal 4	Terminal 4 Heron	20 frames, 3.2 seconds	Parking in the Heron Garage	Yes, both name the Heron Garage
Cruise Terminal 18	Terminal 18 – 4 Day	38 frames, 5.0 seconds	Parking lots B and C unless directed to alternate parking	No, the title names a sailing length instead of a facility
Cruise Terminal 19	Terminal 19 Standard	30 frames, 4.2 seconds	Parking primarily in the Palm Garage	No, the title names no facility at all
Cruise Terminal 21	Terminal 21 Lot A	33 frames, 4.5 seconds	Parking in the Palm Garage unless directed to alternate parking	No, the title names Parking Lot A, which the words never mention
Cruise Terminal 25	Terminal 25 Palm	33 frames, 4.5 seconds	Parking in the Palm Garage	Yes, both name the Palm Garage
Cruise Terminal 26	Terminal 26 Palm	30 frames, 4.2 seconds	Parking in Palm Garage unless directed to alternate parking	Yes, both name the Palm Garage
Cruise Terminal 29	Terminal 29 Palm	39 frames, 5.1 seconds	Parking in Palm Garage	Yes, both name the Palm Garage

The Cruise Terminal 21 line is the one worth stopping on. Its animation is titled for Parking Lot A, the 770 space surface lot with its entrance at 2000 Eller Drive, while the words in the same record send a driver to the Palm Garage. Broward County’s parking page places Parking Lot A near Cruise Terminals 19 and 26 instead, so three county documents put the same lot in three different relationships.

Where a Port Everglades map record and the terminal page it links to disagree

Each record links to the terminal page for the same building, and one pair does not match on the address. The map gives Cruise Terminal 26 as 2026 Eller Drive, Hollywood, FL 33316. The terminal page it links to gives 2026 Eller Drive, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316. Same street number, different city, one click apart. The pages on the other side of those links carry the measurements the records omit, from 259,370 square feet at Cruise Terminal 18 down to 80,200 square feet at Cruise Terminal 29, with 104,162 square feet at the Disney building: the map assigns the parking and the terminal page measures the hall, and neither does both.

Address styling drifts across the eight as well. Five records abbreviate the state as FL and three, for Cruise Terminals 18, 21 and 25, spell out Florida, and the Cruise Terminal 2 record carries a stray double space before its ZIP code. None of that misroutes a car, but it is the signature of eight records typed by hand rather than pulled from one list.

The warning is doubled too. The sentence on screen asks a visitor to check back the day of the cruise because parking assignments may change; the alert inside all eight records says lot assignments may change. Two nouns for the same risk, from the same county, on the same page, which is the sort of split that also runs through the cruise line each Port Everglades terminal is attributed to.

The drop-off instruction is the most uneven field of all. It appears in five records and in three different wordings: Cruise Terminal 2 reads “Drop off passengers and luggage prior to entering garage” with a capital D, Cruise Terminals 19, 25 and 26 read “before entering garage” in lower case, and Cruise Terminal 29 reads “before parking”. Cruise Terminals 4, 18 and 21 carry no drop-off line, a gap that matters more once you read the opening hours Broward County puts on each Port Everglades gate, where two of the three checkpoints close at 6PM.

Which Port Everglades document to open, by the question a driver is actually asking

Four questions cover almost every reason to look for a map of this port, and a different Broward County document wins each one.

Which garage does my terminal use. Winner: the interactive record on the parking map, because it is the only place the county pairs a terminal number with a facility and a cruise line in one line. The nuance: the Cruise Terminal 18 and Cruise Terminal 21 records both end with “unless directed to alternate parking”, so the pairing is a default rather than a promise.

Where is the checkpoint, the cell phone lot or the hotel. Winner: the facilities map, by a distance. Its 23 category legend marks security checkpoints, both garages, the surface lots, the cell phone lot, hotels, dining, a pharmacy and a hospital, none of which the interactive map explains in words. The nuance: the copy the Cruise menu served in September 2026 carried August 8 2023 in its file name, and by October 7, 2026 the menu serves the March 2026 revision as a design file a phone cannot open.

Which exit gets me to the gate. Winner: the facilities map again, and only the facilities map, because Exit 12B to Port Everglades and Exit 12A to the airport appear on no other Broward County cruise page. Anyone driving the 1.8 miles from the airport instead will find that run priced and timed in what the airport and the port each publish for the trip between them.

Which terminal is my ship in on the day. Winner: neither map. Both describe the port as it stands, and the interactive page says so itself by asking a visitor to check back the day of the cruise. The berth by berth answer lives on the county’s public vessel traffic board, which is the artifact behind the Port Everglades ship schedule and the berths it lists by day.

Details of the Port Everglades map that the parking page never mentions

• The map has no page heading of its own. Its browser tab reads Terminal Parking Custom Map, an internal working name, and the page carries no first level heading at all, which is why a search result for it rarely looks like a map.
• Its address sits at the root of the site, one of 21 top level pages, filed beside cargo and about us rather than under cruise. That placement is the reason the Cruise menu never lists it.
• Getting to it takes two clicks and neither one uses the word map at the second step. A card called Port Parking on the cruise landing page leads to the parking page, and the button there reads Find your terminal parking.
• The nearest gate the map names is the one that shuts. Both records carrying a closest entrance, Cruise Terminal 2 and Cruise Terminal 4, point at SE 17th Street and Eisenhower Blvd., which the port’s security page hours as 6AM to 6PM. The gate that never closes, Eller Drive at I-595, runs 24 hours and appears on no record at all. Landing to check-in is a window of 45 minutes to one hour by the port’s own reckoning, and those gate hours have to fit inside it.
• The map carries no price. The $5.00 first hour, the $25.00 daily maximum and the $35 oversized day stay on the parking page, one click back, so the document that assigns the garage is not the document that costs it. Nor does it give the roof: the 7 feet published for the Heron and Palm garages appears on the parking page only.
• The link runs one way. All eight records link out to their terminal pages, and not one of the eight terminal pages links back to the map, so a passenger who starts at Cruise Terminal 25 never learns the map exists.
• The cell phone lot has three published addresses across two pages. The cruise landing page links the words cell phone lot to a pin at 2800 Eisenhower Blvd, while Arriving and Departing names two lots, at 1850 Eller Drive and north of Cruise Terminal 18.
• Only county property is drawn. Commercial lots outside the fence appear on no Broward County map, which leaves the off-site parking options around Port Everglades and what each issuer publishes to be checked operator by operator.
• The facilities map does name one hotel inside the port, the Omni Fort Lauderdale, alongside the Broward County Convention Center, and it is the same county naming used in what Broward County actually publishes about hotels near the cruise terminals.

Where the Port Everglades map sends a driver wrong

Copying the address straight off the map record is the first trap, and it has exactly one victim. The Cruise Terminal 26 record says Hollywood and the terminal page says Fort Lauderdale for the same 2026 Eller Drive, so a satellite navigation system fed the map version is being told to cross a city line that the building never crosses. The other seven records agree with their terminal pages.

Screenshotting the map weeks ahead is the second. A change warning hangs off every record and off the page header, in two different wordings, precisely because a terminal can be reassigned; a picture taken in advance carries the warning and none of the update.

Searching the page for a terminal number is the third, and it fails silently. With no text element in either drawing, a browser find turns up nothing even while the number is plainly visible on screen, and the same is true of the address at 1901 SE 32nd St. for Cruise Terminal 18 until its shape is clicked.

Assuming the Port Map item in the Cruise menu is the parking map is the fourth, and it is the easiest to make, because the label is the more obvious of the two. In September 2026 it opened a 326,025 byte facility guide that names no cruise line and marks the eight cruise terminals as bare numbers among cargo berths and 19 numbered petroleum companies; on October 7, 2026 it downloads the design file instead.

Clicking either Port Map link on a phone is the fifth. Both now hand over an Adobe Illustrator file rather than opening a page, and a phone will download 1,303,753 bytes it has no way to display.

How these Port Everglades map figures were checked

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section, and every figure credited to Broward County or Port Everglades was read again on October 7, 2026, twice and minutes apart, after Tariff No. 12 was reissued on October 1, 2026. The port’s own pages and its tariff page are the places to confirm any of them before the trip. Every October 1, the first day of its fiscal year, the county reissues its port tariff, while shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Six questions about the Port Everglades map and what it actually shows

The answers below come from the same readings as the tables above, taken in September 2026 and repeated on October 7, 2026: the parking map page and its eight records, the cruise parking page, the cruise landing page, the eight terminal pages, the port guides and publications page, and the two facilities map files.

A county that drew the map twice and hid the readable one

Broward County did the expensive work. Someone drew this seaport to scale with a 23 category legend, marked the checkpoints and the cell phone lot and the pharmacy, revised it on 19 March 2026, and separately built an eight record interactive page with a route animation for every terminal, 266 frames of it.

Then the county filed the drawing under a menu label that sounds like a formality, by October 2026 shipped it only as a design file, and gave the interactive page a URL outside the cruise section that its own eight terminal pages never link to. What renders on that page, before anyone clicks, is 171 characters.

The map exists. Finding it is the part Broward County left to the driver.

Related guides

• The eight Port Everglades cruise terminals and the garages assigned to them
• What a week in a Port Everglades garage costs at the $25.00 daily cap
• The three Port Everglades gates and the hours Broward County puts on them
• Which terminal each Port Everglades cruise line is attributed to
• The vessel traffic board that pairs a ship with a berth by day

Debarkation runs 7 to 9AM and the FLL bag counter opens two hours before the flight

Port Everglades tells returning cruise passengers they typically debark between 7 and 9AM. Broward County Aviation tells them airlines at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport may only check bags up to two hours before the flight. Nothing in either sentence covers the hours in between, and the port stores no luggage.

The post-cruise leg from Port Everglades to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport covers 1.8 miles in about 10 minutes, and the wait at the far end is longer than the ride. That is the whole problem with this direction. Going the other way, a passenger controls the clock by choosing a flight. Coming back, the ship sets the start and an airline sets the end.

Both ends belong to Broward County, which runs the seaport and the airport. Neither department publishes a single page covering the morning as one trip. What follows puts their figures side by side, all of them read from the issuing page in September 2026 and read again, twice, on October 7, 2026, against one fixed case: two adults walking off a ship at Port Everglades with checked bags and a flight out of FLL later that day.

What a returning passenger needs to know	Port Everglades (Broward County)	Broward County Aviation Department (FLL)
When passengers leave the ship	Passengers typically debark the ship between 7 and 9AM	Many returning passengers arrive at FLL at 8:30 a.m. on cruise days
Driving time for the 1.8 miles	No figure in either direction; the phrase is just minutes away on U.S. 1	About a 10-minute ride
Time to allow for the transfer	45 minutes to one hour, itemized in five steps that are all arrival steps	No allowance published for the return
When an airline will take the bags	Airlines at FLL may only be able to check your bags up to two hours before your scheduled flight	Up to two hours before, in one accordion, and two to three hours before in two others
Where to leave luggage in between	Due to security regulations, luggage cannot be left or stored at the port	Public Baggage Storage is available in all terminals, 954-359-5505
Taxi fare from a terminal curb	$18 – $21, on all eight terminal transportation pages	$18-$21 on the rate table, $12 estimated on the cruise page
Taxi fare toward Miami Beach	Not published from any terminal	South Beach $80 taxi and $85 luxury sedan, from the airport curb
Free shuttle between the two	Not published	There are no free shuttles to the port

Only three lines carry a figure from both departments, and one of those three, the bag check rule, is the seaport quoting the airport. The rest are answered by one side and left blank or unpriced by the other, which is why a returning passenger who reads only the port’s cruise pages never sees the rule that decides the morning.

Five instructions for returning passengers, and one of them is an airline rule

The Arriving and Departing page at Port Everglades splits into two lists. Departing passengers get seven instructions, covering check-in times, photo ID at the security checkpoint, luggage tags, digital wayfinding with ship names and terminal assignments, and where to keep valuables. Returning passengers get five.

Of those five, two describe something the port controls. Free cell phone waiting lots sit at the Port Administration Building, 1850 Eller Drive, just past the security checkpoint, and north of Cruise Terminal 18, for whoever is collecting you. Porter services hired by your cruise line can be used to deliver your bags to private cars, taxis and limousines, and the port adds that tipping is optional.

The other three are the shore-leave announcement that opens the 7 to 9AM window, the two hour bag rule at FLL, and a suggestion to book a post-cruise shore excursion through the cruise line if the flight is later. So the seaport’s advice for people leaving it consists of two facilities, one airline rule and one referral. The layout of the eight terminals and the garages and lots Broward County runs at Port Everglades is documented in detail on the arrival side; the departure side is five bullet points and a phone number, 954-468-3720.

Two hours or three: one Broward County Aviation page prints both

The number that sizes the wait appears three times on one Broward County Aviation page, and not always the same. All eight accordions on the Cruise Passengers page carry the stamp Updated Jul 29, 2026.

Under Checking Baggage, the county writes that due to peak cruise travel activity with multiple ships in South Florida ports, airlines at FLL may only be able to check your bags up to two hours before your scheduled flight. Under Shore Excursions, it writes that the earliest some airlines will check baggage is two to three hours before a departure. Under When To Go Through Security, it repeats that the earliest some airlines will check baggage is two to three hours prior to the scheduled departure, and adds the hard rule: you must have a boarding pass and your baggage checked in with your airline before you can go through security.

One hour separates the strictest version from the loosest, on the single figure that decides whether a passenger has a gap at all. The seaport resolves nothing, because the sentence it reprints on its own page is the two hour one. A traveler planning against the county’s own pages has to assume the tighter number and treat the extra hour as luck.

Every fare either Broward department prints for a ride off a terminal curb

Only one set of Port Everglades pages prices the return direction: the Alternative Transportation page attached to each of its eight cruise terminals. Those pages carry two tables, and between them they name two destinations for a taxi and three for a shared van. Everything else a debarking passenger might want costs an unpublished amount.

Destination, as the issuer names it	Priced from a Port Everglades terminal	Priced from the FLL curb	Limit the issuer prints
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport	Taxi $18 – $21; Van on Demand $11 per person	Taxi $18-$21; luxury sedan $45	Van needs parties of 3 or more
Miami International Airport	Taxi $80-$159 from Terminals 2, 4, 18, 19 and 21; $80-$150 from Terminals 25, 26 and 29; Van on Demand $25 per person	Taxi $72; luxury sedan $90	Taxi figure is total cost regardless of passengers or vehicle type
Palm Beach International Airport	Van on Demand $45 per person; no taxi row on any of the eight pages	Taxi $135; luxury sedan $145	Van not available on all sailing days
PortMiami	Not published	Taxi $86; luxury sedan $90	Rates are estimates and may vary
South Beach, Miami Beach	Not published from any of the eight terminals	Taxi $80; luxury sedan $85	Subject to the current fuel surcharge
Another Port Everglades cruise terminal	Flat rate of $8 by taxi for back-to-back sailings	Not applicable	The only flat rate the port publishes

Every one of the port’s eight terminal pages opens the taxi table with the same warning: metered rate only, flat rates are not allowed. The rate table on the airport side carries its own, that taxi cab and luxury sedan rates are estimates and may vary, and that taxi rates are subject to change due to the current fuel surcharge. Neither department prices a rideshare, and the port’s cruise FAQ states plainly that there is no negotiated price for ride-share services while listing ride-sharing among the vehicle types waiting outside the terminal.

An 8AM debarkation measured against six departure times

The two published clocks can be run against each other. Take the midpoint of the port’s own window, 8AM off the ship, add the 10-minute ride Broward County Aviation publishes plus time to reach a taxi, and a passenger stands at an FLL check-in hall around 8:30 a.m., which is the exact hour the county says returning cruise passengers arrive on cruise days. The arithmetic below is ours; every input is the issuer’s.

Scheduled departure from FLL	Bag drop opens, two hour version	Bag drop opens, three hour version	Time holding your own luggage from 8:30 a.m.
10:00 a.m.	8:00 a.m.	7:00 a.m.	None, the counter is already open
11:00 a.m.	9:00 a.m.	8:00 a.m.	30 minutes, or none
12:00 noon	10:00 a.m.	9:00 a.m.	1 hour 30 minutes, or 30 minutes
1:00 p.m.	11:00 a.m.	10:00 a.m.	2 hours 30 minutes, or 1 hour 30 minutes
2:00 p.m.	12:00 noon	11:00 a.m.	3 hours 30 minutes, or 2 hours 30 minutes
4:00 p.m.	2:00 p.m.	1:00 p.m.	5 hours 30 minutes, or 4 hours 30 minutes

A 9AM debarkation, the late edge of the port’s window, takes an hour off every figure in the last column and rules out the 10:00 a.m. departure entirely, since the ride alone puts that passenger at the FLL curb around 9:30 a.m. The reason not to gamble on the early end comes from Broward County Aviation: airlines discourage passengers from standing by for earlier flights on cruise days, which it names as Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, because flights are booked to capacity, and the county warns the result is crowded terminals and limited seating.

Where the bags go while the counter is closed, on three separate pages

The storage question gets a single sentence in the Port Everglades cruise FAQ: due to security regulations, luggage cannot be left or stored at the port. That closes the obvious option and creates the problem the table above measures.

Two other Broward pages answer it. Public Baggage Storage is available in all terminals, Broward County Aviation states, and it prints a number for that service, 954-359-5505. The same page adds two remedies that start before the airport: some airlines offer baggage check-in at the port for the return flight, and some airlines have arrangements with baggage companies to transport your baggage directly from your cabin to your airplane. Both send the reader to the airline rather than to a price.

Two companies do get named by the port, and only on its Things to Do in the Area page, the one its menu still labels Pre- and Post Cruise: Bags to Go or Bounce can securely store your luggage while you explore. It gives neither an address, an opening hour nor a rate. The county that will not hold a suitcase names two firms that will, on the page a debarking passenger is least likely to open.

Which one wins depends on the departure time in the table. Before 11:00 a.m., nothing wins, because there is no gap to fill and the right move is a taxi at $18 – $21 straight to the counter. Between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., the airport’s own storage wins, because it sits inside the terminal the passenger has to reach anyway and carries a published phone number. After 1:00 p.m., the airline’s port-side bag check wins when it exists, since it removes the luggage before the wait begins rather than parking it somewhere. Broward’s own fallback for a late departure is renting a car at the Rental Car Center instead of spending the day at the airport, which the county recommends in those words.

Miami Beach is priced from the airport curb and from nowhere at the port

The taxi table on all eight Port Everglades terminal pages has two rows, FLL and Miami International Airport, and was checked one page at a time in September 2026. There is no Miami Beach row, no South Beach row, and no row for any destination in Miami-Dade County other than the airport.

South Beach does carry a price on the airport department’s rate table, $80 by taxi and $85 by luxury sedan, stamped Updated Jul 23, 2026. That fare starts at the FLL curb, 1.8 miles from the seaport, not at a gangway. The same table prices Port Everglades itself at $18-$21, so one Broward County rate card carries both ends of the journey and nothing that joins them.

What a passenger can do with that is bracket, not budget. The port’s only published fare into Miami-Dade County is the taxi band to Miami International Airport, $80-$159 or $80-$150 depending on the terminal, 27 miles south, a drive the port’s Getting Here page puts at 30 – 45 minutes via I-95. That airport is the nearest destination in the county either department prices from a gangway. Anyone quoting a firm figure for a Port Everglades to Miami Beach taxi is not quoting Broward County, and the port forecloses the workaround by stating that taxis run on the meter and flat rates are not allowed. The same 27 mile corridor read in the opposite direction, from MIA down to a numbered Port Everglades terminal, is priced by three issuers who disagree.

Which terminal curb sends you where, and the one that says nothing

Each of the eight Alternative Transportation pages is written in the second person to someone already standing outside a terminal, which makes them the only Port Everglades pages aimed at a passenger who has just walked off a ship. At Cruise Terminal 2 the instruction is to cross back to the terminal and go up the same ramp you descended from. A taxi at Cruise Terminal 4 waits directly across the street, north of where you are standing, and at Cruise Terminal 19 directly across the street, south. From Cruise Terminal 25 you walk north with the terminal on your right, past the main entrance doors, to a crosswalk. At Cruise Terminal 26, taxi loading is in the pavilion directly adjacent, or just east.

Cruise Terminal 18 gives no taxi directions at all. Its page carries the fares and the metered-rate warning, then jumps to the Van on Demand booth, telling you to walk along the curb with the building on your left. It is the largest terminal in the port at 259,370 square feet with 90 check-in counters, and the port’s own parking map lists it as primarily used by Royal Caribbean International. Knowing which Port Everglades terminal your line uses therefore also tells you whether the walk to the taxi rank is published.

The fare bands split by terminal too. Miami International Airport reads $80-$159 from Terminals 2, 4, 18, 19 and 21 and $80-$150 from Terminals 25, 26 and 29, a $9 difference in the ceiling that depends on which building your ship happened to use. For a party of three the Van on Demand price of $25 per person totals $75 and beats the taxi floor of $80. At four passengers the van costs $100 and the taxi could still land at $80, so the taxi wins on the low end and loses on the high one. The van is the only one of the two whose total is known before the doors close, and the only one carrying the warning that it is not available on all sailing days.

Details of a debarkation morning that appear on only one page each

• Taxi cabs accept up to five people for the fare stated on the meter and take credit cards, per Broward County Aviation, so a family of five pays the same $18 – $21 as a couple.
• Porter service reaches private cars, taxis and limousines. Those are the three vehicle types Port Everglades names, and a rental company shuttle is not one of them.
• Drivers must clear out: all vehicles must leave the parking area once debarkation activities are concluded on the return morning, and the port states its Heron and Palm garages and surface lots are not staffed 24/7 or on non-cruise days. Item 1135 of the port tariff, in the issue effective October 1, 2026, reads more loosely and lets a cruise passenger’s car stay through one week after the final debarkation date if the charges are paid; the FAQ rule is the one to plan on.
• The airport and its transportation providers cannot provide child safety seats of any type, Broward County Aviation writes on two separate pages, so a family flying home has to carry one off the ship.
• The only flat rate at the port is $8, for a taxi transfer between two cruise terminals on a back-to-back booking. Everything else runs on the meter.
• Coaches and hotel transportation vehicles wait in designated areas outside the terminal alongside taxis and ride-sharing, says the port, without naming a single operator or hour. A room at one of the hotels around the seaport and convention center is the only version of that vehicle with an address.
• Getting Here adds that transfers from Port Everglades to the airport or hotel are often included in many cruise packages, and refers the question to the cruise line or travel agent.

Where a post-cruise morning at Port Everglades goes wrong

Booking a 10:00 a.m. departure is the first error. The port’s window closes at 9AM, Broward’s own observation puts returning passengers at FLL at 8:30 a.m., and a 10:00 a.m. departure leaves nothing for the walk off the ship, the queue at the taxi rank and the drive.

The second is reading the port’s 45 minutes to one hour as a return allowance. It is not. The five steps that allowance itemizes are claiming luggage at the airport, boarding transportation to the port, clearing the security checkpoint, checking baggage curbside and filling out forms inside the terminal. Every one of them happens on the way in. The port publishes no equivalent figure for the way out, in either the FAQ or on Getting Here.

The third is assuming a bag can be parked somewhere on port property for a few hours. The fourth is planning to stand by for an earlier flight on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday, which Broward County Aviation says the airlines discourage. The fifth is arriving at the airport with a firm Miami Beach fare in mind, since no Broward County page prices that ride from a cruise terminal. The sixth is treating the port’s $18 – $21 as a ceiling: the county’s rate card ends with the note that the figure is an estimate subject to the current fuel surcharge, and the inbound version of the same 1.8 miles is priced at $12 on one Broward page and $21 on another.

How these Port Everglades and Broward County figures were dated

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section. Every figure credited to Broward County or Port Everglades was read again, twice and with identical text, on October 7, 2026, after the county’s fiscal year opened on October 1, and none of the fares, clocks or phone numbers used here had changed; the port’s parking rates did change that day, which this departure guide does not rely on. Tariff items at Port Everglades carry October 1 effective dates, shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Both the taxi and the Van on Demand tables were read from each of the eight Port Everglades terminal transportation pages separately, which is how the $80-$159 and $80-$150 split came to light. The Broward County Aviation pages carry their own stamps, Updated Jul 23, 2026 on the ground transportation rate table and Updated Jul 29, 2026 on every accordion of the cruise passengers page.

Six questions about leaving Port Everglades on debarkation morning

Each answer below comes from a Port Everglades cruise page or a Broward County Aviation Department page, both read in September 2026 and again on October 7, 2026.

The one leg of the trip nobody at the port puts a clock on

Broward County measures the way in down to the tenth of a mile. It publishes 1.8 miles, a 10-minute ride, a 45 minute to one hour allowance broken into five named steps, and a taxi fare from each of its two departments. Then the ship comes back, and the same county publishes a debarkation window, a warning that it will not hold your suitcase, and an airline’s rule it does not set.

That is why the return is the leg where a passenger has to do the arithmetic themselves. The ride still takes 10 minutes. What decides the morning is the gap between the gangway and a counter that will accept a bag.

Broward County prints the length of that gap twice, an hour apart, on the same page.

Related guides

• Terminals, garages and gates at Port Everglades
• The inbound version of the same 1.8 miles
• Debarkation morning at PortMiami, priced from the pier
• What Brightline publishes for the Fort Lauderdale station

Three Fort Lauderdale pre-cruise zones, and Broward County measures only one of them

Broward County publishes one distance for this decision: Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport sits 1.8 miles from Port Everglades. No county page measures a hotel to a cruise terminal, in any zone. What the county does publish is gates, gate hours, bus stops and one hotel it built itself.

A pre-cruise zone in Fort Lauderdale is a set of gates and bus stops rather than a radius, because no issuer draws the radius. The airport zone, as Broward County Aviation describes it, is the ground within five miles of 100 Aviation Blvd. For the beach, Broward County Transit names one bus route and no other. The convention center frontage is the county’s own build, and Broward County opened the 801-room Omni Fort Lauderdale there on December 18, 2025.

Hotel rates, van schedules and package terms are not published or audited by any public agency, so no property is priced or recommended here beyond the one the county names in its own capital project pages. Everything below carries an issuer and a month; every figure was read in September 2026, and every Broward County and Port Everglades figure again on October 7, 2026.

Where the room sits, as a Broward County page describes it	The distance its issuer publishes	How that issuer says you reach a terminal	The gate hours that apply	What no issuer publishes for this zone
Airport zone, the “many economy hotels within five miles of the airport” of the Broward County Aviation cruise passengers page	1.8 miles to Port Everglades per the port’s cruise FAQ, and about a 10-minute ride per Broward County Aviation	Two options without a reservation, shared ride and taxi cab at $12 estimated, against $18 – $21 for the same cab on the port’s own page	All three checkpoints, inside an allowance of 45 minutes to one hour for the whole transfer	Which gate the ride uses, and the name of a single hotel
Beach and 17th Street Causeway, which Broward County Transit reaches at Fort Lauderdale Beach Park, 1100 Seabreeze Blvd	None. No Broward County page prints a mile or a minute from a beach address to any terminal	Route 40 at $2 per adult, with its port-side time point printed as SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd	Checkpoint 3, Southeast 17th St./Eisenhower Blvd., 6AM – 6PM	Any fare, distance or travel time between a beach address and a berth
Convention center frontage, where Broward County opened a 29-story, 801 room hotel on December 18, 2025	Less than one mile from the beaches, and “adjacent to” the cruise terminals with no mileage attached	The Convention Center Connector reaches the hotel from U.S. 1 and State Road 84 without a checkpoint, and reaches no gangway	Checkpoint 3 again, the entrance the port names as closest for Cruise Terminals 2 and 4	A distance or a walking time from that hotel to any of the eight terminal addresses
All three zones on embarkation morning, once the car or the van is moving	1.8, 27 and 50 miles are the three the port prints, and all three end at a runway	Every vehicle bound for a terminal clears a checkpoint, with photo ID for everyone aged 18 and older	Checkpoint 1, Eller Dr./I-595, is open 24/7 and the other two are not	A terminal opening hour; the instruction is to follow the cruise line’s assigned check-in time

Column two is the whole problem in one line. Two of the three zones have no published number of any kind, and the third borrowed its number from an airport.

Six issuer statements measure the airport zone and no two of them agree

Port Everglades prints its distances in the cruise FAQ and nowhere else: Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport at 1.8 miles, Miami International Airport 27 miles south, Palm Beach International Airport, renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport (DJT) in July 2026, 50 miles north. On its Getting Here page the same department drops the number entirely and writes that the airport is just minutes away on U.S. 1.

On the airport side the same county puts a clock on it instead. Its cruise passengers page, stamped as updated on July 29, 2026, states that it is about a 10-minute ride from the airport to Port Everglades. Those ten minutes then sit inside the port’s own allowance of 45 minutes to one hour, which covers claiming luggage, boarding transportation, clearing the security checkpoint, checking baggage curbside and filling out forms inside the terminal. The road is the shortest of the five steps.

Three cruise lines measure the same gap and widen it. Read in September 2026, Princess Cruises calls it about 2 miles, Holland America Line approximately 3 miles, and Royal Caribbean International 5 miles, against the 1.8 the county prints. A zone whose one selling point is proximity therefore carries a published spread of 3.2 miles, and the largest figure comes from a company that also sells the sailing. The fare side of the same gap, where two Broward departments print two different cab prices, is worked out in the account of the 1.8 mile leg that Broward County prices twice.

One comparison on that airport page settles what the ten minutes are worth. That page puts PortMiami at about 45 minutes from the same terminals and tells passengers to allow at least 90 minutes. Measured against that, the Fort Lauderdale airport zone wins on published travel time, about 10 minutes against about 45, on the criterion of what the issuer itself commits to in writing.

The one hotel Broward County names is measured to the beach, not to the ship

One hotel appears by name on a Broward County page in connection with the seaport, and it appears there as a capital project. The county commission started a $1.1 billion expansion of the Broward County Convention Center in 2019 with a headquarters hotel attached, and on October 20, 2025 it opened the Convention Center East Expansion together with the Convention Center Connector. The expanded center now runs to more than 1,200,000 square feet, including a 350,000 square foot contiguous exhibition hall and a 65,000 square foot waterfront ballroom, and the work added 525,000 square feet of meeting space.

The Omni Fort Lauderdale opened on December 18, 2025, at 29 stories and 801 rooms. The county describes it as connected to the Convention Center, “adjacent to” its Port Everglades cruise terminals, and less than one mile from the beaches. Read that sentence for its arithmetic and the finding is small and useful: the county attaches a mileage to the beach and a preposition to the ship. That is the only proximity figure any Broward County page attaches to a named property, and it points away from the water the cruise leaves from.

The Port Everglades website carries the link itself. Its Development menu holds an item labeled Hotel and Convention Center Expansion whose target is the county convention center page, and it is the single hotel anchor among the 302 links on the port’s own Getting Here page. Nothing in the Cruise menu, across Getting Here, Parking, Cruise Lines, Terminals, Security and the FAQ, names a property at all.

What the county publishes about that building is fact with a date on it: room count, height, opening day, and an expected lift of more than $450 million a year and more than 3,000 full and part-time jobs. What the hotel says about itself, including any rate, package or departure time, is not county-published and is not repeated here. The line is the issuer, not the industry.

Two of the three Port Everglades gates close at 6PM, and the port names one of them as closest

The security page is the only Port Everglades page that numbers the entrances, and it puts hours beside each: Checkpoint 1 at Eller Dr./I-595 runs 24/7, Checkpoint 2 at East State Road 84/Spangler Blvd. runs 6AM – 6PM, and Checkpoint 3 at Southeast 17th St./Eisenhower Blvd. runs 6AM – 6PM. The Getting Here page lists the same three gates in the reverse order and numbers none of them, which is why the hours are easy to miss.

Now cross those hours with the port’s own parking map. Of its eight terminal records, two carry a closest entrance and both name the same corner: Cruise Terminal 2 at 1801 SE 20th Street and Cruise Terminal 4 at 1800 SE 20th Street are both sent to SE 17th Street and Eisenhower. The gate the county nominates for two of its eight buildings is a gate that is shut for twelve hours out of every twenty-four. Getting Here compounds it by telling anyone already in the Fort Lauderdale area that the SE 17th St. or State Road 84 entrances may be more convenient, which are the two with closing times. The full gate and building geometry behind that instruction is laid out in the reference on the eight numbered terminals and the garages and lots Broward County assigns to each.

Behind any of the three gates the rules are identical and worth knowing before a van is booked. Everyone aged 18 and older shows a government-issued photo ID plus cruise documents, guests arriving by personal car receive a placard for the rear-view mirror or the driver’s side dashboard that must stay unobstructed and visible for inspection, and cruise guests have access to the cruise area only, since roaming through the port is prohibited. Two pages of the same department even word the search differently: Getting Here says vehicles are subject to search and cites Florida State Statute 311.12(3b), while the security page says guests may be subject to periodic vehicle screening and transcribes 311.12(7).

One road skips all of it and proves the point. The Convention Center Connector, opened October 20, 2025, is described by the county as an elevated bypass through Port Everglades that links U.S. 1 and State Road 84 to the Convention Center and the Omni Fort Lauderdale, “eliminating the need to pass through Port security checkpoints”, while easing the 17th Street Causeway corridor. The county built a way to reach that block without a gate, and it ends at a lobby rather than a berth. A guest sleeping on the convention center frontage is outside the fence, and crosses a checkpoint on sailing morning like everyone else.

The free shuttle sentence is attached to one zone and its retraction sits on the same page

Both halves of the contradiction live on the Broward County Aviation cruise passengers page, whose eight accordions all carry the stamp Updated Jul 29, 2026. Under Finding a Hotel: “There are many economy hotels within five miles of the airport, and several offer free shuttle service to both the airport and the seaport.” Under Transportation to Port Everglades, in a subsection headed Shuttles: “There are no free shuttles to the port.”

The geography is what makes it a zone question rather than a proofreading question. That five-mile ring is the only search instruction any Broward County page gives someone looking for a room before a sailing, and the department spells out the method: filter the Visit Lauderdale hotel listing for airport hotels, or type its own address, 100 Aviation Blvd, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33315, into MapQuest and click the lodging icon. The county’s recipe for finding a pre-cruise hotel is a circle drawn around a runway.

No equivalent sentence exists for the other two zones. Nothing on any Broward County page attaches a shuttle claim to a beach address or to the convention center frontage, and Port Everglades keeps its own wording zone-blind and unpriced: “Many area hotels provide transportation between Port Everglades and the hotel. Contact your hotel for details.” The port never writes the word free about a hotel vehicle, and its Travel Tip pushes the question further out still, to the cruise line or the travel agent.

For planning, the Shuttles line wins, on the criterion of who stands behind it. That sentence belongs to the department that runs the baggage claim, and Broward County Aviation lists exactly two options there for a passenger arriving without a reservation, shared ride and taxi cab. The other sentence describes a benefit belonging to unnamed private properties, and how little of it survives a deposit is set out in the survey of what Broward County will and will not say about hotel shuttles at Port Everglades.

One Broward County Transit route touches all three zones and times only one of them at the port gate

Route 40 runs from Lauderhill Transit Center to The Galleria at Fort Lauderdale via Sistrunk Boulevard, the 17 Street Causeway and A1A, on an all-week schedule effective September 27, 2026. Its eastbound time points include Broward Central Terminal and then the corner of SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd, which is the corner Port Everglades publishes as an entrance. On the first weekday trip the bus leaves Broward Central Terminal at 5:30 a.m. and is timed at that gate corner at 5:43 a.m., a printed hop of 13 minutes.

That single route is the connective tissue between all three candidate zones, and it treats them unequally. On the Destinations page of Broward County Transit, Fort Lauderdale Beach Park at 1100 Seabreeze Blvd is listed against Route 40 and no other route, no time is printed for the beach in either direction, and Port Everglades does not appear among the 15 transportation facilities named. Westbound, which is the direction from the beach toward the ship, the timed corner is SE 17 St. and SE 15 Ave. rather than Eisenhower, so the leg that matters to a beach guest has no printed time at the gate. Each increment of that crossing is counted in the account of the beach run priced from a Broward County Transit timetable.

The downtown end is where the geometry pays. Broward Central Terminal stands at 101 NW 1 Avenue in ZIP 33301, one avenue from the Brightline station, which its own station page gives as 101 NW 2nd Avenue in ZIP 33311, the same door number under a different ZIP, and Route 40 meets 13 other numbered routes there plus the US 1 Breeze. The commuter railroad keeps its Fort Lauderdale station in another quadrant of the city and off that county map, so of the two Fort Lauderdale rail stations only one shares a block with the bus that reaches the port gate, a mismatch traced in the study of the gap Brightline and Port Everglades both leave blank.

Two weekend clocks then cut across all of it. Brightline publishes Mon – Fri hours for its Fort Lauderdale station while publishing seven-day hours for its other five Florida stations, and the customer service window at Broward Central Terminal opens at 8:45AM on Saturday and Sunday. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday are the cruise days Broward County Aviation names, and Port Everglades says passengers typically debark between 7 and 9AM, before that window opens. Route 40 itself keeps running, since its schedule is all week.

Which Fort Lauderdale zone wins, by arrival and by sailing day

Four arrivals, one set of premises: two adults, one pre-cruise night, embarkation at a numbered terminal, and issuer pages read in September 2026.

Flying in the night before goes to the airport zone, on the criterion of published measurement. It is the only zone with a distance, 1.8 miles from the port’s FAQ, a ride time, about 10 minutes from Broward County Aviation, and two priced fallbacks if a hotel van fails to appear. What cuts against it is that none of those numbers buys speed at the barrier, since Port Everglades still asks for 45 minutes to one hour between a flight arrival and a check-in time.

Driving in on the evening before goes to the convention center frontage, on the criterion of gate hours. Its approach from U.S. 1 and State Road 84 runs over the Convention Center Connector, which Broward County opened on October 20, 2025 and describes as eliminating the need to pass through Port security checkpoints, while the two gates nearest the same causeway close at 6PM. The qualifier is that the road buys the arrival and not the departure: the same car crosses Checkpoint 3 or Checkpoint 1 the next morning, and the sum it is really competing with sits in what a Fort Lauderdale package has to beat before anyone books it.

A Saturday or Sunday sailing goes to any zone reachable without the rail chain, on the criterion of weekend hours. Brightline prints Mon – Fri for the Fort Lauderdale station and the customer service window at Broward Central Terminal opens at 8:45AM on both weekend days, against a debarkation window the port puts between 7 and 9AM. One exception favors the bus, because Route 40 runs an all-week schedule and keeps its times when the counters are shut.

A boarding pass reading Cruise Terminal 2 or Cruise Terminal 4 goes to the causeway side, on the criterion of the port’s own nomination. Those are the only two of eight terminal records on the parking map that name a closest entrance, and both name SE 17th Street and Eisenhower, the same corner Route 40 is timed at eastbound. The clock takes it back, because that gate runs 6AM – 6PM and the advantage exists only in the morning.

Zone details that appear only on a Broward County or Port Everglades page

• Cruise days, per Broward County Aviation, are Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and the same page warns that many returning passengers reach the airport at 8:30 a.m. for flights spread across the day.
• Every one of the eight records on the port parking map carries the same alert, “Check back the day of your cruise for updated parking information. Lot assignments may change”, while the header of that same page says parking assignments may change. Two wordings, one department, one screen.
• The map and the terminal pages disagree on a city. Cruise Terminal 26 at 2026 Eller Drive prints Hollywood on the parking map and Fort Lauderdale on its own terminal page, inside the shared ZIP 33316.
• The fare box takes exact change only, since Broward County Transit states that operators do not carry change. Its adult one-way is $2, the All Day Pass is $5, and the reduced fare is $1.
• The port lists its own access modes twice and differently: car, taxi, ride-share, bus and rail in the cruise FAQ, and car, taxi, bus, train and ship on Getting Here. Its only page headed Rail belongs to freight.
• The convention center page mentions enhanced water taxi access, and no Port Everglades cruise page mentions a water taxi at all, so nothing published ties that boat to a terminal.
• A Fort Lauderdale room bought for a Miami sailing buys a different allowance entirely, since Broward County Aviation puts PortMiami at about 45 minutes and asks for 90, and the three zones on that side are compared in the breakdown of what each Miami pre-cruise zone is priced at.

Where a Fort Lauderdale zone choice falls apart before the gangway

Reading “adjacent to” as a walk is the first error. In the county’s own wording the Omni Fort Lauderdale is adjacent to its cruise terminals, and the single figure attached to it is a beach figure, less than one mile. The road Broward County built to that address is the one designed to avoid the port checkpoints. Adjacency across a secured boundary is not a distance.

Booking the causeway for an evening arrival at the gate is the second. Checkpoint 2 and Checkpoint 3 both run 6AM – 6PM, so a car that reaches SE 17th Street and Eisenhower at 7 p.m. is at a closed entrance, and Eller Dr./I-595 is the gate the port keeps open 24/7.

Treating 1.8 miles as a hotel distance is the third. That figure is airport to seaport, and the same gap reads 2 miles at Princess Cruises, 3 at Holland America Line and 5 at Royal Caribbean International, none of which measures anybody’s room.

Planning a weekend transfer on a weekday clock is the fourth. Brightline publishes Mon – Fri hours for the Fort Lauderdale station and the customer service window at Broward Central Terminal opens at 8:45AM on Saturday and Sunday, while the port debarks passengers between 7 and 9AM.

Expecting a free van because one county sentence says several exist is the fifth and the costliest. Two accordions down on the same July 29, 2026 page, Broward County Aviation publishes the flat line that there are no free shuttles to the port, and Port Everglades has never printed the word free beside a hotel vehicle. A shuttle that no agency names, times or caps is the one link in the chain with no issuer at all.

How these Broward County and Port Everglades figures were checked

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section. Every figure credited to Broward County, Broward County Transit or Port Everglades was read again, twice and with identical text, on October 7, 2026. Three details moved: Route 40 now runs on a timetable effective September 27, 2026, whose first weekday trip leaves Broward Central Terminal at 5:30 a.m.; the 8:45AM weekend hour the transit agency prints belongs to the customer service window, not to the building; and the port’s parking maximum rose to $25 on October 1, 2026, which this guide does not use. Tariff items at Port Everglades carry October 1 effective dates, shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Six questions about where to sleep before a Fort Lauderdale sailing

The six answers below rest on Port Everglades cruise pages for getting here, security, the terminal parking map and frequently asked questions, on the Broward County Aviation cruise passengers page and the Broward County convention center expansion page, and on the Broward County Transit Route 40 timetable, all read in September 2026 and again on October 7, 2026.

The county measured the runway, the beach and the ballroom, and left out the ship

Broward County put a number on 1.8 miles of airport road, on 525,000 square feet of new meeting space and on less than one mile of beach. It put no number between any bed and any of the eight terminal doors. So the zone question answers itself sideways: pick the zone whose published clocks fit your sailing day, then ask the front desk for the one number nobody else will give you.

Related guides

• The eight numbered terminals and the parking facilities at Port Everglades
• Hotels near Port Everglades and the eight addresses they are measured against
• What a Fort Lauderdale park and cruise package has to beat
• The 1.8 mile airport leg that Broward County prices twice
• PortMiami and Port Everglades measured against each other

Eighteen Fort Lauderdale attractions, and the Broward County document that lists them is a bus timetable

Broward County Transit publishes eighteen points of interest on the Route 40 timetable, and Port Everglades is the thirteenth of them. Its own Shore Excursions page names no attraction at all: it names two luggage storage companies and links the word sightseeing to a tourism board, verified September 2026.

A pre-cruise day in Fort Lauderdale is governed by three documents, and only one of them was written for a traveler with free time. The seaport states that luggage cannot be left or stored at the port, tells departing passengers not to arrive before their assigned check-in time, and hands the question of what to see to a website it does not control. Its sister department, Broward County Transit, prints the list nobody asked for in the margin of a timetable.

Document and the Broward County department that issues it	What it publishes about the hours before a sailing	Effect on a pre-cruise day
Port Everglades Shore Excursions page, filed at /cruise/things-to-do-in-the-area/	One paragraph. Bags to Go or Bounce can securely store your luggage while you explore, plus a link to Visit Lauderdale’s Cruise and Play guide	Opens the day by solving the bags, and names zero places to go
Port Everglades cruise FAQ	Due to security regulations, luggage cannot be left or stored at the port	Makes the porter at the terminal front the only place a checked bag can go
Port Everglades Arriving and Departing page	Follow cruise line’s assigned check-in time. To alleviate delays, do not arrive prior to assigned time	Closes the day against an hour printed on a booking, not on any county page
Broward County Transit Route 40 timetable, effective September 27, 2026	Eighteen points of interest, and a weekday time point at SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd.	The one Broward County list of attractions attached to a printed departure time
Broward County Transit fare page	$2 adult one-way cash fare, $5 All Day Pass, exact fare is required	The only price any Broward County department puts on a ride from the port into town
Broward County convention center expansion page	The Omni Fort Lauderdale opened December 18, 2025 with 801 rooms across 29 stories, less than one mile from the beaches	The one nearby destination the county describes with figures and a date

Five of those six rows come from a department that runs a seaport or a bus network. None comes from a tourism office. That is the whole published record.

Two luggage companies and an outbound link are the whole of the seaport’s answer

The page that should carry the answer is titled Shore Excursions, sits at /cruise/things-to-do-in-the-area/, and is still labelled Pre- and Post Cruise in the left menu. Read in September 2026 it runs to four sentences. Cruise guests will find ways to relax and adventure in Greater Fort Lauderdale. Options are available for every budget. If you only have a few hours, no problem. Then the operative one: Bags to Go or Bounce can securely store your luggage while you explore.

Two proper nouns, and both of them are lockers. The port does not describe either company, publish a price, publish an address or publish an opening hour, and the link it attaches to Bags to Go does not go to that company at all: it goes to a listing on visitlauderdale.com. The Bounce link resolves to a search page pre-filled with Fort Lauderdale, FL. The fourth sentence sends the reader to Visit Lauderdale’s Cruise and Play guide.

The same pattern runs on the cruise landing page. There, the sentence reads that there are plenty of quick sightseeing options if you only have a few hours to spare, and the word sightseeing is a link to visitlauderdale.com/things-to-do/. The seaport operates eight numbered cruise terminals and reported over 4.7 million cruise passengers in fiscal year 2025, and it has published no list of its own about what surrounds them. Those terminals, their street addresses and the gates that reach them are set out in how Broward County lays out Port Everglades and its eight terminals.

One line on that landing page is worth more than the rest. The cruise landing page calls the Omni Fort Lauderdale the only on-port accommodations, which makes it the single building in this chain a cruise passenger can reach without leaving port property.

Where Broward County Transit prints Port Everglades, thirteenth of eighteen names

The Route 40 timetable is a five page PDF issued by Broward County Transit, effective September 27, 2026 and replacing the October 26, 2025 edition, covering Lauderhill Transit Center to The Galleria at Fort Lauderdale via Sistrunk Boulevard, the 17th Street Causeway and A1A. Its fourth page carries a column headed POINTS OF INTEREST, printed sideways beside the route map, and it holds eighteen entries.

Read in order, they are Lauderhill Mall, Central Broward Park and Broward County Stadium, the Swap Shop and Thunderbird Drive-in Theater, the Edgar P. Mills Multi Purpose Center, the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center, Riverwalk, the NSU Art Museum, BC/FAU/FIU, Broward Health Medical Center, Harbor Shops of Fort Lauderdale, Southport Shopping Center, the Broward County Convention Center, Port Everglades, the Jungle Queen, the International Swimming Hall of Fame Museum, the Bonnet House Museum and Gardens, Hugh Taylor Birch State Park, and the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale.

The list is not alphabetical. It runs broadly west to east, from the mall at the route’s inland terminus to the mall at its coastal one, and the seaport sits thirteenth, printed between the Broward County Convention Center and the Jungle Queen. Two names on either side of a cruise port is as close as any Broward County department comes to telling a passenger what is next door.

Across the thirty nine route timetables published on the Broward County Transit schedules page and read for this guide, exactly two carry Port Everglades among their points of interest: Route 1 and Route 40. Route 1 lists ten names, most of them hospitals, courthouses and casinos, and its published time points are Aventura Mall, Hallandale Beach Blvd. and US 1, Young Circle, the FTL-HWD International Airport terminal, Broward Health Medical Center and Broward Central Terminal. Not one of them is at the seaport. Route 40 names the port and stops at its gate.

Thirty seven weekday trips call at the port gate corner, and seven reach the ocean end

Port Everglades describes its own bus service without a number. Local bus service stops at the Northport section of Port Everglades on SE 17th St., just north of the Greater Fort Lauderdale and Broward County Convention Center, it says, then gives a phone number. The route number, the times and the fare all live in the transit agency’s document, and the figures below were read cell by cell from the Monday to Friday block of the Route 40 timetable, by the horizontal position of every printed time, in September 2026 and again in the edition effective September 27, 2026, read twice on October 7, 2026.

What the Monday to Friday Route 40 timetable prints	Figure	Why it decides the size of a pre-cruise window
Eastbound trips with a printed time at SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd.	37 trips, first 5:43 a.m., last 10:54 p.m.	The gate corner has more service than any other published link to the port
Eastbound trips with a printed time at SE 20 St. and Ocean Dr., the Points of America stop	7 trips: 7:19, 7:46, 8:16, 8:41 and 9:13 a.m., then 3:12 and 4:01 p.m.	Nothing is printed at the ocean end between 9:13 a.m. and 3:12 p.m.
SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd. to the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale	13 to 23 minutes, most often 16 or 18	Gate to eastern terminus, one seat, no transfer
Broward Central Terminal departure to SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd.	13 to 21 minutes	Downtown Fort Lauderdale to the port gate, from a terminal that connects fourteen routes
Westbound trips with a printed time at SE 17 St. and SE 15 Ave.	35 trips, first 6:34 a.m., last 10:38 p.m.	The return leg is timed at a different corner from the outbound one
Galleria at Fort Lauderdale back to SE 17 St. and SE 15 Ave.	18 to 32 minutes	The return runs slower and less predictably than the outbound
Longest scheduled gap between eastbound trips at the gate corner	46 minutes, between 9:58 and 10:44 a.m.	The worst printed wait, against ten trips between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Two asymmetries in that table matter more than the rest. The first is directional: SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd. is time point 6 eastbound only, and the westbound schedule replaces it with SE 17 St. and SE 15 Ave., time point 5. A traveler can leave the port gate on a printed time and cannot come back to it on one, which is the same asymmetry that shapes the crossing between Fort Lauderdale Beach and the port entrance.

The second is the ocean branch. The legend on that timetable separates a main route from a limited service route, and the Points of America stop belongs to the limited one. Five morning trips serve it, the last at 9:13 a.m., and the next printed time there falls six hours later. Anyone aiming for the southern beach end by bus after breakfast is planning around a column of blanks.

Do not arrive prior to assigned time is the arrival rule Port Everglades publishes

The clock that matters here is not a bus clock. Under Departing passengers, Port Everglades gives one instruction about when to show up: follow cruise line’s assigned check-in time, and to alleviate delays, do not arrive prior to assigned time. No terminal opening hour appears anywhere on the site, and no check-in cut-off either, which is the reverse of the arrangement at Port Canaveral, where the port itself publishes a gate hour.

That leaves a reader with one hour set by a document nobody else can see, and one hour set by the port, and the second belongs to the wrong end of the trip. Passengers typically debark the ship between 7 and 9AM, the same page says, under Returning passengers. The sightseeing advice sits there too: extend your stay with a tour of Greater Fort Lauderdale, offered to people with a later flight, alongside the warning that airlines at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport may only be able to check your bags up to two hours before your scheduled flight. Arriving passengers are told to wait. Returning passengers are told to go and look around.

The bags settle the rest. Due to security regulations, luggage cannot be left or stored at the port, and porters are available at the front of all cruise terminals to collect baggage. The county adds an order of operations in its cruise FAQ: drop off all luggage and passengers at the terminal before parking. A morning that parks first has already spent part of the window it was trying to fill, and the airport leg that feeds most of these mornings is measured in the 1.8 mile transfer that Broward County prices twice.

What two adults pay to spend the gap in town, and what the same hours cost in a garage

Both halves of this trip carry a published price, and they come from different Broward County departments. Fares on Broward County Transit run $2 for an adult one-way cash fare, $5 for an All Day Pass bought on the bus, $12 for three days and $20 for seven, with reduced fares of $1 and $4 for riders 18 and under, on Medicare or with a disability. Exact fare is required, in its own words, because operators do not carry change.

Port Everglades prices the other half. Since October 1, 2026, parking is $5 for 0 to 1 hour, $10 for up to 5 hours, with a $25 daily maximum and a $35 daily maximum for oversized vehicles on the parking rates page, and all daily rates begin when you pull the parking ticket from the machine. The tariff behind those figures puts sales taxes inside the price rather than on top, which is worked through in how Broward County counts a Port Everglades parking day.

Two adults walking out of a cruise terminal for the morning therefore spend $10 on two All Day Passes, on top of a parking bill they were paying anyway. The comparison set stays thin because the county keeps it thin: Port Everglades publishes a taxi estimate of $18 – $21 to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and $80 – $159 to Miami International Airport, and no fare at all to any Fort Lauderdale address. Its Van on Demand tables price three airports and nothing else. For a ride from a cruise terminal into the city, the $2 bus fare is not the cheapest published option. It is the only published option.

Which plan wins with an early bus, a mid-morning start and a car already parked

Three situations cover most Port Everglades sailings, and the winner changes with the hour on the ticket.

With an afternoon check-in time and no car, the winner is Route 40 eastbound from SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd., on the criterion of published certainty. It is the only leg in the chain whose departure times exist on a public page rather than inside a booking: 37 weekday trips, a worst printed wait of 46 minutes, and 13 to 23 minutes to the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale. The nuance is the return, which carries no printed time at the gate corner westbound and hands the traveler a different crossing at SE 15 Ave.

With a morning start and a taste for the ocean end, the winner is the 8:41 a.m. or 9:13 a.m. trip, on the criterion that Broward County Transit prices no later morning departure at SE 20 St. and Ocean Dr. before a six hour blank. The nuance is that the limited service branch is not the main route, so a later bus from the same corner reaches the Galleria and not the water.

With the car already in the Heron or Palm garage, the winner is doing the terminal first and the city second, on the criterion of the port’s own sequence. Bags go to a porter, the ticket comes out of the machine, and the $25 daily maximum runs whether the car is watched or not; the hours in town then cost $10 in bus passes and nothing more. The nuance is that hotel packages sold on the same premise have to beat that arithmetic, which is scored in what a Fort Lauderdale park and cruise package has to be worth.

Ruled out in all three: leaving a bag anywhere on port property. The county’s answer to that does not vary by hour, by terminal or by day of the week.

Details in these Broward County documents that change how much of the day is usable

• The timetable states its own tolerance. Listed under time points are scheduled departure times, Broward County Transit writes, and it asks riders to arrive at the bus stop five minutes early because buses operate as close to published timetables as traffic conditions allow.
• There are additional bus stops in between those listed, printed at the head of every Route 40 timetable page, which is why the eighteen points of interest are not all served from a time point.
• Broward Central Terminal, at 101 NW 1 Avenue, is where Route 40 meets fourteen other routes on its own map, and the run from its departure bay to the port gate corner takes 13 to 21 minutes on a weekday.
• Local travelers are told which gate to use: for those already in the Fort Lauderdale area, the SE 17th St. or State Road 84 entrances may be more convenient. Everyone 18 and older shows a government-issued photo ID at whichever one they pick.
• The convention center next door reopened larger. Broward County publishes an expanded building of more than 1,200,000 square feet, with a 350,000 square foot contiguous exhibition hall, a 65,000 square foot waterfront ballroom, 525,000 square feet of added meeting space and a public waterfront plaza opening in 2026, after a $1.1 billion project the County Commission started in 2019.
• One phrase in that same county paragraph is the only thing either department has published about a water taxi: enhanced water taxi access, listed among the improvements to the expanded convention center. Neither the county nor the seaport publishes a dock, a fare or a timetable for it, so there is nothing to plan around.
• Back-to-back passengers get the one on-port price the seaport sets itself: taxi transfers between terminals at a flat rate of $8, with no negotiated price for ride-share services.

Where a Fort Lauderdale pre-cruise plan runs out of printed times

Each of these has a document behind it, and each costs hours rather than dollars.

Planning the return leg off the outbound timetable. The gate corner is eastbound only. A traveler who notes a 4:16 p.m. departure at SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd. and assumes a mirror image coming back is reading a column that does not exist, and the westbound equivalent at SE 15 Ave. runs 18 to 32 minutes from the Galleria.

Treating the ocean stop as regular service. Five weekday trips print a time at SE 20 St. and Ocean Dr. up to 9:13 a.m. and two more in the afternoon, out of 37 that pass the gate. The gap between them is six hours long and it lands exactly where a pre-cruise morning does.

Budgeting the day backwards from a sailing time. No departure hour appears on any Port Everglades cruise page, so the number has to come from the ticket or from the county’s own vessel database, whose arrival and departure rows are read in the Port Everglades ship schedule filed on a separate subdomain.

Assuming the seaport will hold a bag for an hour. It will not, in any terminal, at any hour, and the two names it offers instead belong to companies whose hours and prices no Broward County department publishes or audits.

Booking a room on the strength of the word near. No Broward County department publishes a distance from any hotel to any cruise terminal, which is the gap examined in what the county actually says about hotels near the Port Everglades terminals. The single published measurement in that neighborhood is the county’s own line that the Omni Fort Lauderdale sits less than one mile from the beaches.

How these Broward County and Port Everglades figures were checked

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section. Everything credited to Broward County, Broward County Transit or Port Everglades was read again, twice and with identical text, on October 7, 2026. The county’s new fiscal year had changed two things, and both are used above: a Route 40 timetable effective September 27, 2026, whose times moved by a minute or two at most corners and whose worst eastbound gap grew from 39 to 46 minutes, and a port parking maximum of $25 from October 1, 2026, up from $20. The bus fares, the points of interest list and the convention center figures did not move. Tariff items at Port Everglades carry October 1 effective dates, shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Six questions about the hours before a Port Everglades sailing

The answers below come from readings taken in September 2026 and repeated on October 7, 2026: the Route 40 timetable effective September 27, 2026, the Broward County Transit fare page, the Port Everglades cruise FAQ, Shore Excursions, Arriving and Departing and parking rate pages, and the county convention center project page.

An attraction list that exists because a bus happens to pass

Route 40 was not designed to fill a cruise passenger’s morning. It was designed to move Lauderhill to a shopping mall, and the eighteen names in its margin are there so a rider can recognize a stop. That accident is the most useful document Broward County has published on the subject, because it is the only one pairing a place with a departure time, and its current edition has been in force since September 27, 2026.

Set against it, the seaport’s answer is a referral. Two locker companies, a link to a tourism board, and an instruction not to turn up early. Miami-Dade County goes the other way at its own port, naming nine attractions and refusing every locker, a contrast laid out in how PortMiami answers the same pre-cruise question.

The bags get solved by a private company and the map gets drawn by a bus.

Related guides

• The eight Port Everglades terminals and the three gates that reach them
• Port Everglades parking rates and how a ticket day is counted
• Crossing from Fort Lauderdale Beach to a Port Everglades terminal
• The same pre-cruise window measured at PortMiami instead
• Reading the Broward County vessel tracker before a sailing

The only price either Broward County department prints for the crossing itself sits in a bus timetable

Broward County Transit names one bus for Fort Lauderdale Beach Park on its Destinations page, Route 40, and prints its full weekday timetable. No Broward County department publishes a fare, a distance or a travel time between that beach and any of the eight Port Everglades cruise terminals, in September 2026.

A Fort Lauderdale Beach to Port Everglades transfer costs $2 per adult on Route 40, which is the only fare either Broward County department publishes for it. The seaport prints a taxi estimate for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and for Miami International Airport, and nothing else. The figures below come from the agency that issues each one, read in September 2026 and again on October 7, 2026, and they answer a single trip: two adults leaving a Fort Lauderdale Beach address on sailing morning for a numbered cruise terminal.

How you leave Fort Lauderdale Beach	What its issuer publishes for this leg	Published price	Best for
Broward County Transit Route 40	An all-week timetable effective September 27, 2026, with time points on the 17th Street Causeway	$2 one way per adult in cash, exact fare required	Two travelers with one bag each and an hour to give the trip
Metered taxicab	Port Everglades: “Metered rate only. Flat rates are NOT allowed”	Not published for any origin except FLL at $18 – $21 and MIA at $80 – $159	Anyone who has to arrive at a specific terminal address at a specific hour
Ride app pickup, Uber or Lyft	Port Everglades cruise FAQ: “There is no negotiated price for ride-share services”	Not published by any Broward County department	One traveler willing to accept the price the app shows
Hotel shuttle from a beach property	Port Everglades: “Many area hotels provide transportation between Port Everglades and the hotel. Contact your hotel for details”	Not published, and the port never uses the word free	A guest who has the offer confirmed in writing by the property
Van on Demand	Port Everglades: $11 per person to FLL, $25 to MIA, $45 to PBI, parties of 3 or more	Not offered from a beach address in either direction	The ride to an airport after the cruise, not the ride to the ship
Own car left in a port garage	Broward County Tariff No. 12, item 1135	$25.00 daily maximum with sales taxes inside it, or $175.00 for seven ticket days	A driver whose car is already parked at the beach hotel

Only two rows of that table carry a number set and printed by a Broward County agency for this specific movement. One of them is a bus fare and the other is a parking rate, which is what you pay for not making the trip at all.

Three published street corners stand between a beach towel and a gangway

Port Everglades publishes three entrances and puts a security checkpoint on each: Southeast 17th Street at Eisenhower Boulevard, State Road 84 just east of U.S. 1 at Spangler Boulevard, and I-595 East at Eller Drive. Guests aged 18 and older must present a government-issued photo ID and cruise documents, no weapons are allowed under Florida State Statute 311.12(3b), and vehicles are subject to search.

The three distances the seaport does publish all end at a runway: 1.8 miles to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, 27 miles to Miami International Airport and 50 miles to Palm Beach International Airport, renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport (DJT) in July 2026. No Broward County page prints a mileage from a Fort Lauderdale Beach address to a cruise terminal, and none prints a minute count either.

The Getting Here page of Port Everglades also tells local travelers which gate to use, stating that for those already in the Fort Lauderdale area, the SE 17th Street or State Road 84 entrances may be more convenient. Behind those gates sit eight numbered terminals, from Cruise Terminal 2 at 1801 SE 20th Street to Cruise Terminal 29 at 2200 SE 35th Street, and the reference on the eight Port Everglades terminals and the garages and lots Broward County assigns to each is what turns a gate into a destination. A beach traveler is never going to the port. They are going to a street number inside it.

One sentence on the same port page covers public transport in full: local bus service stops at the Northport section of Port Everglades on SE 17th Street, just north of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center, with a phone number and a link to Broward County Transit. No route number, no fare, no frequency, and no walking distance to any of the eight terminal addresses.

The one Broward County Transit time point at the port’s own gate belongs to Route 40

Broward County Transit publishes the missing route number in a place the port never links to. Its Route 40 timetable, effective September 27, 2026, is titled “Lauderhill Transit Center to The Galleria at Fort Lauderdale via Sistrunk Boulevard/17th Street Causeway/A1A”, and its eastbound time points run Lauderhill Transit Center, Sunrise Boulevard and NW 31 Avenue, Broward Central Terminal, the corner of SE 17th Street and Eisenhower Boulevard, Points of America at SE 20th Street and Ocean Drive, and the Galleria.

That fourth time point is the corner Port Everglades calls its own entrance. The route map prints the seaport and the Broward County Convention Center beside it, and the port appears in the timetable’s list of 17 points of interest, alongside the International Swimming Hall of Fame Museum, Bonnet House Museum and Gardens and Hugh Taylor Birch State Park. Of the 52 route timetables Broward County Transit published in September 2026, three name Port Everglades in that way: Route 1, Route 40 and the US 1 Breeze, Route 101. Only Route 40 prints Eisenhower Boulevard.

The same route is the one Broward County Transit assigns to the beach. Its Destinations page lists Fort Lauderdale Beach Park at 1100 Seabreeze Boulevard against a single route number, 40, and gives Bonnet House three routes, 11, 36 and 40. Route 11, whose timetable is effective May 24, 2026, does print a beachfront time point at Las Olas Blvd. and A1A, but it runs north from there to the Galt Mile and A1A and Atlantic Boulevard, and its schedule never names Port Everglades.

What Broward County Transit times on this causeway, and what it leaves untimed

The timetable is the only document in this whole transfer with clock times in it, so the table below counts what it prints. All figures are read from the Route 40 weekday timetable effective September 27, 2026, which replaced the October 26, 2025 edition, and the trip counts are our own tally of its rows.

Time point on Route 40, as Broward County Transit prints it	Direction it appears in	Weekday trips timed there	First and last weekday time	What the county puts beside it
SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd	Eastbound only, toward the Galleria	37 of 38	5:43 a.m. to 10:54 p.m.	The route map marks the seaport and the Broward County Convention Center here
SE 17 St. and SE 15 Ave.	Westbound only, toward Lauderhill	35 of 38	6:34 a.m. to 10:38 p.m.	The next printed time point westward is Broward Health Medical Center
SE 20 St. and Ocean Dr, Points of America	Both, on selected trips	7 eastbound, 2 westbound	7:19 a.m. to 4:01 p.m. eastbound	The south tip of the barrier island, off A1A
Broward Central Terminal	Both, with separate arrival and departure times	37 of 38 departures	5:30 a.m. to 10:39 p.m. departing eastbound	Transfers to Routes 1, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 20, 22, 30, 31, 50, 60, 81 and the US 1 Breeze
Galleria at Fort Lauderdale	Both, as the eastern terminus	37 eastbound, 35 westbound	5:56 a.m. to 11:08 p.m. eastbound	The end of the A1A leg named in the route title
Fort Lauderdale Beach Park, 1100 Seabreeze Blvd	Named on the Destinations page, printed in no timetable	None, because it is not a time point	No time printed in either direction	The beach the whole trip starts from

The bottom row is the finding. A Destinations page names Route 40 as the bus for Fort Lauderdale Beach Park, and then no timetable prints a time for that beach, in either direction, across all 52 of them. The schedule does add that there are additional bus stops in between those listed, and that the bus picks up and drops off at every Broward County bus stop sign along the route, so an untimed corner is not an unserved one.

Four or five minutes out to the island, ten minutes back, and one direction with no printed time at all

The two directions of Route 40 are not mirror images, and the difference falls on the leg that matters most. Going to the ship from a beach address means riding westbound, and the first time Broward County Transit prints after the island belongs to SE 17th Street and SE 15th Avenue, a different corner of the same street. The Eisenhower Boulevard corner, the one Port Everglades publishes as its entrance, carries no westbound time.

Coming back from the ship is the eastbound direction, and there the same corner carries 37 weekday times, from 5:43 a.m. to 10:54 p.m., with consecutive buses 19 to 46 minutes apart, the widest gap falling in mid-morning. The port states that passengers typically debark between 7 and 9 AM, so the return direction is already running more than an hour before the first passenger walks off.

The scheduled hops are asymmetric too. Eastbound, the seven trips that serve Points of America take 4 or 5 minutes from the Eisenhower Boulevard corner to SE 20th Street and Ocean Drive. Westbound, the two trips timed there take 10 minutes to reach the SE 15th Avenue time point. Those are Broward County Transit’s own minutes; the doubling comes from the westbound routing, not from our arithmetic.

Two adults for $8, and the same $8 the port charges to cross its own property

Run the published fare out and the comparison settles itself. Two adults riding Route 40 to the port and back pay four cash fares at $2 each, which is $8, by our own arithmetic on the Broward County Transit adult rate. The port charges a flat rate of $8 for a single taxi transfer between two of its own terminals for back-to-back cruisers. One county agency will move two people across the causeway twice for what the other charges to cross the property once.

Against parking the comparison is wider and narrower at the same time. Seven ticket days at the $25.00 daily maximum that took effect on October 1, 2026 is $175.00, with sales taxes already inside it under item 1135, and the port adds that all daily rates begin when you pull the parking ticket. The bus wins that subtraction by $167.00, but only for a couple who would otherwise have driven, which is why the $25.00 cap and the eight step schedule underneath it belong to a different decision than this one.

The winner by scenario is therefore split, and the criterion is delivery rather than money. For two adults with one bag each and no assigned check-in time before mid-afternoon, Route 40 wins outright: it is the only mode either county prices for this leg. For a party of three or more with cruise luggage, or anyone whose cruise line assigned an early boarding window, the metered taxi wins on delivery rather than on price: it ends at the street number the cruise line printed on the ticket instead of on SE 17th Street, and the port’s rule that only metered rates apply is the nearest thing to a price control on it. Neither agency publishes the walk from that bus stop to any terminal door, and neither says which side of the checkpoint it is on.

Details of the beach run that only appear in a timetable or a rate card

• Put the corner into a trip planner, not the port. Port Everglades writes it as Southeast 17th Street at Eisenhower Boulevard and the transit agency writes the same corner as SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd.
• Exact fare is required when boarding and operators do not carry change, in Broward County Transit’s own words. The adult one-way is $2 and the reduced fare for riders 18 and under, on Medicare or with a disability is $1.
• The All Day Pass is $5, so a second ride the same day still costs less than the pass and the third one pays for it.
• Route 40 is an all-week schedule, not a weekday route, and the version in force carries the date Effective 9/27/26 on its cover.
• Transfers happen at Broward Central Terminal, where Route 40 meets Routes 1, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 20, 22, 30, 31, 50, 60 and 81 plus the US 1 Breeze, which is what a beach address north of Sunrise Boulevard will need.
• Live tracking now sits in the RideBCT app, which Broward County Transit says combines trip planning, real-time bus tracking and fare payment, and the agency staffs 954-357-8400, which is the same number Port Everglades gives when it declines to name the route.
• Broward County’s Consumer Protection Division licenses and regulates chauffeurs, taxis and for-hire vehicles in the county from 1 N. University Drive, Suite 203 in Plantation, open 8:00AM to 4:00PM Monday through Friday. The seaport sends taxi, limousine and bus operators to that division for their business permit and prints no meter rate itself.

Where a Fort Lauderdale Beach transfer goes wrong on sailing morning

The first mistake is directional. Boarding Route 40 eastbound at a beach stop takes you north to the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale, away from the water and away from the port; the port is on the westbound side of the same schedule, and the westbound trip crosses the causeway before its first printed time.

The second is reading a points of interest list as a stop list. Route 40 names Port Everglades among 17 destinations, but the timetable’s port-side time point is a public street corner at a security gate, not a terminal curb, and everyone aged 18 and older still shows a government-issued photo ID and cruise documents to get past it.

The third is planning around Points of America. Only 7 of the 38 weekday eastbound trips and 2 of the 38 westbound trips are timed at that spur, and the last eastbound one is at 4:01 p.m. The fourth is assuming a cab will quote a price at the terminal: all eight Port Everglades terminal pages state that only metered rates apply and that flat rates are not allowed, and the port prints no estimate for any origin other than the two airports. The fifth is arriving early with bags to kill time, because Port Everglades states that luggage cannot be left or stored at the port and that passengers should follow the cruise line’s assigned check-in time and not arrive before it.

The last one is a false comparison with a hotel van. The port publishes only that many area hotels provide transportation between Port Everglades and the hotel and that guests should contact the hotel for details, and the guide to what Broward County will and will not say about hotel shuttles at Port Everglades shows how little of that is checkable before a deposit is paid.

Dating the timetable, the fare table and the rate card behind this crossing

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section, and everything credited to Broward County, Broward County Transit or Port Everglades was read again, twice and with identical text, on October 7, 2026. That reading found two changes, both dated to the county’s new fiscal year: a Route 40 timetable effective September 27, 2026, whose times replace the old ones above, and a port parking maximum of $25.00 from October 1, 2026, up from $20.00. The $2 fare did not move. Tariff items at Port Everglades carry October 1 effective dates, shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Six questions about crossing from Fort Lauderdale Beach to a cruise terminal

The six answers below rest on the same October 7, 2026 readings as the tables above: the Route 40 timetable effective September 27, 2026, the Broward County Transit Destinations page and fare schedule, and the Port Everglades cruise pages.

The one approach to Port Everglades that nobody was asked to price

Broward County Aviation Department prints a taxi estimate of $80 from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to South Beach, a beach in another county. It prints nothing at all for the beach on its own side of the county line, which is the one a Broward cruise passenger is most likely to be standing on. The seaport prices what arrives by air and leaves the rest to whoever is driving.

What fills the gap is a bus schedule written for a different purpose. Route 40 exists to connect Lauderhill to a shopping mall, and it happens to cross the causeway that both endpoints of this trip sit on, which is why the only two published numbers a beach traveler can use are a $2 fare and a set of time points, one of which is missing in the direction that matters.

That is a workable answer and a fragile one. It holds as long as the timetable holds, and it changes without notice on the next effective date, which is the risk of building a trip on a document that was never about the port.

Related guides

• The 1.8 mile airport leg that Broward County prices twice
• The Miami Beach crossing that is priced by county formula instead
• Which Port Everglades terminal each cruise line uses
• What a Fort Lauderdale park and cruise package has to beat
• PortMiami and Port Everglades measured against each other

Broward County prints opening hours on the three Port Everglades gates, and one of them never closes

Port Everglades has three gated entrances, and Broward County publishes different hours for each: the Eller Drive checkpoint runs 24/7, the other two close at 6PM. Checkpoint 1 sits at Eller Dr. and I-595, Checkpoint 2 at State Road 84, and Checkpoint 3 at Southeast 17th St., verified September 2026 and October 2026.

That schedule is the part of a drop-off no terminal address can carry. Eight street numbers sit across the Port Everglades cruise terminal pages and three entrance descriptions sit on its Getting Here page, and those two lists never appear together. The hours appear with neither of them: they sit on the cruise Security page, under a heading a driver hunting for directions has no reason to open.

What follows is that cross, assembled only from what Broward County publishes: the numbered checkpoints and their hours, the eight terminal records on the port’s own parking map, the drop-off sentence in the cruise FAQ, and the four highway exits on Getting Here. Every line below was read from a Port Everglades or Broward County page in September 2026 and read again on October 7, 2026.

Entrance as Port Everglades writes it	Number and hours on the Port Everglades security page	Terminals the county names for it on its parking map	How Port Everglades tells a driver to reach it
I-595 East, located at Eller Dr.	Checkpoint 1, 24/7	None named for this gate	All four highway routes Port Everglades publishes end here: I-95 south Exit #26, I-95 north Exit #24, I-75 Exit #19 and Florida’s Turnpike Exit #54, each of them to I-595 East
State Road 84, just east of U.S. 1, at Spangler Blvd.	Checkpoint 2, 6AM to 6PM	None named for this gate	Port Everglades offers it, with SE 17th St., to guests already in the Fort Lauderdale area
SE 17th St., located at Eisenhower Blvd.	Checkpoint 3, 6AM to 6PM	Cruise Terminal 2 and Cruise Terminal 4, the two buildings the Heron Garage serves	Port Everglades offers it to guests already in the Fort Lauderdale area, and Broward County Transit stops on SE 17th St. at the Northport section of the port

The security page numbers the Port Everglades entrances that the directions page only lists

Two Port Everglades pages describe the same three gates and, read together in September 2026, agree on nothing except the streets. The directions page lists them in the order SE 17th Street, then State Road 84, then I-595 East, with no numbers attached and no hours. The Security page lists them in exactly the reverse order, numbers them 1 to 3 and attaches an opening schedule to each. A driver who reads only the directions page leaves the house believing the three entrances are interchangeable.

The same pair of pages describes the vehicle inspection with two different verbs. Getting Here states that vehicles are subject to search. The Security page states that cruise guests may be subject to periodic vehicle screening upon arrival at any security checkpoint. One reads as a certainty and the other as a sample, and Broward County never reconciles them.

The identity requirement is the one sentence both pages carry. Getting Here says each entrance has a security checkpoint where cruise guests and visitors ages 18 and older are required to provide a government-issued photo ID such as a driver’s license or passport, along with cruise documents. That sentence reappears on the Security page, applied to any of the port’s security checkpoints. Neither page writes a shorter rule for a car that is only dropping people off, a gap that also shapes the way Port Everglades numbers its eight terminals and six parking facilities.

Two of the eight Port Everglades terminals get a closest entrance named, and six get none

The cross does exist, on one page, for one quarter of the port. A record for each of the eight cruise terminals sits on the Port Everglades parking map, and two of those records end with a line naming the nearest gate. Cruise Terminal 2 reads “Closest entrance: SE 17th Street/Eisenhower entrance” and Cruise Terminal 4 reads “Closest Entrance: SE 17th Street and Eisenhower Blvd.”, the same gate written two different ways. The other six records stop at the parking assignment.

Those same records also name cruise lines for seven of the eight buildings, which the terminal pages themselves mostly do not. The map is where Broward County states that Cruise Terminal 18 is primarily used by Royal Caribbean International and Cruise Terminal 29 by Celebrity Cruises and Royal Caribbean International, two attributions that appear nowhere in the prose of the terminal pages and that sharpen which Port Everglades terminal each cruise line publishes for itself. The map heads that data with its own warning: parking assignments may change, so check back the day of your cruise.

Cruise terminal and the address Port Everglades prints on its map	Cruise line the map names	Parking the map assigns	Closest entrance the map names	Drop-off instruction inside the map record
Cruise Terminal 2, 1801 SE 20th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316	Primarily used by Princess Cruises	Heron Garage, 1,818 spaces, 7-foot clearance	SE 17th Street/Eisenhower, Checkpoint 3, 6AM to 6PM	Drop off passengers and luggage prior to entering garage
Cruise Terminal 4, 1800 SE 20th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316	Disney Cruise Line	Heron Garage, 1,818 spaces, 7-foot clearance	SE 17th Street and Eisenhower Blvd., Checkpoint 3, 6AM to 6PM	None printed, though the terminal page lists a covered guest drop-off
Cruise Terminal 18, 1901 SE 32nd St., Hollywood, Florida 33316	Primarily used by Royal Caribbean International	Parking Lots B and C, 404 and 600 spaces, unless directed to alternate parking	None published	None printed
Cruise Terminal 19, 2019 Eller Drive, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316	Used by various cruise lines	Primarily the Palm Garage, 1,966 spaces, 7-foot clearance	None published	Drop off passengers and luggage before entering garage
Cruise Terminal 21, 2021 Eller Dr., Hollywood, Florida 33316	Primarily used by Balearia Caribbean, Princess Cruises and Holland America Line	Palm Garage, 1,966 spaces, unless directed to alternate parking	None published	None printed
Cruise Terminal 25, 2025 Eller Dr., Hollywood, Florida 33316	Primarily used by Celebrity Cruises	Palm Garage, 1,966 spaces, 7-foot clearance	None published	Drop off passengers and luggage before entering garage
Cruise Terminal 26, 2026 Eller Drive, Hollywood on the map and Fort Lauderdale on the terminal page, FL 33316	Primarily used by Holland America Line	Palm Garage, 1,966 spaces, unless directed to alternate parking	None published	Drop off passengers and luggage before entering garage
Cruise Terminal 29, 2200 SE 35th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316	Primarily used by Celebrity Cruises and Royal Caribbean International	Palm Garage, 1,966 spaces, plus the shuttle Port Everglades runs to Cruise Terminal 29	None published	Drop off passengers and luggage before parking

Read down the last two columns and the pattern is uncomfortable. The two terminals with a named entrance are pointed at a checkpoint that closes at 6PM, and neither of those two records repeats the drop-off instruction that five of the other six carry.

The one sentence Port Everglades writes about its own drop-off curb

The county advertises this curb and regulates it in a single line, on a page about weapons. Under its cruise rules, the Security page instructs drivers not to leave vehicles unattended in “No Parking” zones, fire lanes or passenger drop-off areas. That is the entire published rule for the drop-off area: no time limit, no length of stay, no fine, no address.

The order of operations is published elsewhere and is unambiguous. The cruise FAQ asks whether to park first or go straight to the cruise terminal, and answers that the port recommends dropping off all luggage and passengers at the terminal before parking. Its baggage answer says the same thing again for drivers, adding that porters will be available at the front of all cruise terminals to collect baggage and that porters carry spare tags for anyone who arrives without them.

Everything else about the curb is a bullet. The Arriving and Departing page sells efficient drop-off areas, covered walkways and curbside porter service for baggage as amenities of the port, without saying where any of them is. Only one of the eight terminal pages puts a drop-off in its own amenity list: Cruise Terminal 4, whose Disney Cruise Line facilities list a covered guest drop-off beside 27,314 square feet of Passenger Embarkation Area and 28 check-in stations. The other seven list check-in stations, escalators and floor area instead.

One more object waits at the gate that no directions page mentions. Cruise guests arriving by personal car will receive a placard to be placed on the rear-view mirror or on the driver’s side dashboard, unobstructed and visible for inspection, in the wording Broward County uses. It appears once, on the Security page, in the same list as the drop-off sentence.

Three photo IDs for two passengers at a Port Everglades checkpoint

Count the documents a drop-off actually presents. Broward County requires a government-issued photo ID from cruise guests and visitors ages 18 and older, still the wording on October 7, 2026, so a driver taking two adults to a ship hands over three IDs, one of which belongs to somebody who will not board. Add a third adult passenger and the number is four. A 17-year-old in the same car adds nothing to the pile, because the county sets the threshold at 18.

The weapons rule is cited twice by the same port with two different subsections. Getting Here says no weapons are allowed on port property in accordance with Florida State Statute 311.12(3b). The Security page quotes Florida State Statute 311.12(7) instead, the subsection that makes it a first degree misdemeanor to have a concealed weapon in or upon a vehicle in a designated restricted area, and lists the exemptions: active-duty certified federal or state law enforcement personnel, and persons designated in writing by the seaport director. Anyone else has to write to the Port Director at [email protected] with a copy of a State of Florida concealed weapons permit and an employer’s letter.

Two further limits belong to the driver rather than the passenger. Drones appear on the prohibited list alongside firearms, flares and liquid bleach, on a list Broward County ties to 33 CFR 105.515(a). And cruise guests have access to the cruise area only, because roaming through the port is prohibited, which rules out sightseeing on the way back out. Suspicious activity goes to the Broward Sheriff’s Office at Port Everglades on 954-765-4511.

Orange herons, green palm fronds, and four highway exits that all feed one gate

Once past the barrier, Broward County stops naming streets and starts naming colors. The parking page tells drivers bound for the Heron Garage to follow the orange directional signs featuring a flying Heron, and drivers bound for the Palm Garage to follow the green directional signs featuring a palm frond, in both cases from any of the port’s entrances. The Arriving and Departing page adds that colorful digital wayfinding featuring Florida native plants and animals will appear with ship names and terminal assignments, which is where the ship to building match finally becomes public inside the fence.

Outside the fence, the routing is one-directional. Port Everglades publishes four highway approaches and all four end at the same place: I-95 southbound takes Exit #26, I-95 northbound Exit #24, I-75 Exit #19 and Florida’s Turnpike Exit #54, each of them to I-595 East and then the exit to Port Everglades. Every one of those drivers arrives at Checkpoint 1, the only entrance Broward County lists as 24/7. The SE 17th St. and State Road 84 gates are offered only to those already inside Fort Lauderdale.

One road crosses Port Everglades without a checkpoint, and it does not help a cruise passenger. Broward County opened the Convention Center Connector on 20 October 2025 as an elevated bypass to the expanded convention center, describing it as eliminating the need to pass through Port security checkpoints. It serves convention traffic, and a car bound for a cruise terminal still clears one of the three gates.

What a Port Everglades drop-off is worth against $5.00 for an hour and $175.00 for the week

The barrier only charges a car that takes a ticket. All daily rates begin when you pull the parking ticket from the machine at the garage or parking lot, in the county’s own words, which means a driver who stops at the terminal curb, unloads and leaves the port never starts a clock. That is the entire financial case for a drop-off, and it produces three different prices for the same errand.

What the car does at Port Everglades	What Broward County charges	Where Broward County publishes the figure	Best for
Stops at the terminal, unloads passengers and bags with a porter, leaves the port	$0.00, because no ticket is pulled	Port Everglades parking page, read September 2026 and October 7, 2026	A driver who is not sailing and can leave before the checkpoint closes
Pulls a ticket, parks under one hour, walks the bags in, leaves	$5.00 for 0 to 1 hour, sales taxes included	Port Everglades parking page and item 1135 of Tariff No. 12	A driver escorting a passenger who needs help to the terminal door
Pulls a ticket and leaves the car for a seven night sailing	$175.00, seven daily maximums of $25.00, sales taxes included	Item 1135 of Port Everglades Tariff No. 12, issue number 8, effective October 1, 2026	A passenger who is both driving and sailing

The gap between the first and third rows is $175.00 of avoidable cost, and it is the same arithmetic behind the seven night parking total the $25.00 daily maximum produces at Port Everglades. The gap between the first two rows is smaller than most drivers assume: $5.00 buys a full hour inside the garage, which is more time than a curbside handover needs.

On the return leg the port pays for the wait outright. Two free cell phone waiting lots are published, one at the Port Administration Building at 1850 Eller Drive, just past the security checkpoint, and one north of Cruise Terminal 18, and Broward County says passengers typically debark the ship between 7 and 9AM. The Eller Drive lot sits behind Checkpoint 1, the gate that never closes, which makes it the only free waiting spot reachable at any hour.

Which Port Everglades gate wins, by arrival hour and by terminal

Four scenarios cover almost every drop-off, and the Broward County pages decide three of them outright.

Arriving before 6AM or leaving after 6PM, from anywhere. Winner: I-595 East at Eller Dr. It is the only one of the three Port Everglades checkpoints listed as 24/7, so at 5:30AM the other two are not a slower choice, they are a closed one. The nuance: the port publishes no terminal opening hour, so an early arrival buys a parking space and a wait, not an early check-in.

Coming from I-95, I-75 or Florida’s Turnpike at any hour. Winner: I-595 East at Eller Dr. again, on the port’s own routing, since all four published exits feed it. The nuance: a driver who leaves the highway early to reach SE 17th St. is choosing a gate the county never routed them to.

Already inside Fort Lauderdale, bound for Cruise Terminal 2 or Cruise Terminal 4, between 6AM and 6PM. Winner: SE 17th St. at Eisenhower Blvd. This is the only case where Broward County names a gate for a specific building, and it names it twice, once per terminal record. The nuance: those two records are the ones that leave the drop-off instruction out.

Bound for any of the other six terminals. Winner: I-595 East at Eller Dr., by elimination rather than by assignment. Four of those six sit on Eller Drive itself at numbers 2019, 2021, 2025 and 2026, the county names no closer gate for any of them, and it publishes no alternative that stays open past 6PM. Treat this one as what it is: the gate the county’s own directions produce, not a gate the county assigned.

Details of a Port Everglades drop-off that no terminal address carries

• The check-in time comes from the cruise line, not the port. Departing passengers are told to follow the cruise line’s assigned check-in time and, to alleviate delays, not to arrive prior to that time. A terminal opening hour appears nowhere on the port’s site, which is the reverse of the 10 AM rule Port Canaveral publishes for its own terminals.
• Luggage tags belong on the bags before the car reaches the gate. The cruise FAQ asks passengers to attach the tag prior to arriving at the port, and confirms that porters at the front of all cruise terminals carry additional tags for anyone who did not receive them.
• Nothing can be left behind. Luggage cannot be left or stored at the port, in the county’s phrasing, so a bag that misses the ship goes back in the car rather than into a locker.
• The airport run is short and priced twice. Port Everglades puts Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport 1.8 miles away with an average taxi fare of $18 to $21, while Broward County Aviation calls it about a 10-minute ride, the two readings behind the airport to Port Everglades transfer and what each issuer charges for it.
• Cruise documents travel in the carry-on. The port asks passengers to keep identification and cruise documents out of checked luggage because they are produced at the checkpoint and several times more before boarding.
• A hotel van faces the same three gates and the same ID count as a private car, which is why the shuttle question in what Broward County publishes about hotels near the Port Everglades terminals turns on the slowest passenger rather than on distance.

Where a Port Everglades drop-off breaks before the car reaches the curb

The failures are not dramatic and they repeat. One driver programs SE 17th Street because a search result mentioned it, arrives at 5:40AM for a passenger with an early check-in, and finds Checkpoint 3 shut until 6AM with no published detour except a drive back to I-595. A second driver reaches the gate with two passengers who packed their passports in checked bags, because the port asks for photo ID from everyone 18 and older, including the person staying behind the wheel.

A third arrives at Cruise Terminal 18 or Cruise Terminal 29 expecting the county to name a gate the way it does for Cruise Terminals 2 and 4, and finds an address and a parking assignment with no entrance line at all. A fourth trusts a terminal number printed weeks ago, when the county’s own map warns that parking assignments may change and asks drivers to check back the day of the cruise; the pairing that settles it on the day is in the Port Everglades vessel traffic board and the berths it lists by day.

The last failure is the cheapest to avoid and the easiest to make. A driver stops at the curb to walk a passenger inside, leaves the car unattended in the drop-off area, and breaks the single sentence Broward County wrote about that curb. An hour in the Heron or Palm garage costs $5.00 and carries no such instruction. The equivalent decision one county south, where the geometry is a tunnel and a bridge rather than three gates, runs through the two sentences Miami-Dade County writes for a car dropping someone at PortMiami.

How these Port Everglades entrance and drop-off figures were checked

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section, and every figure credited to Broward County or Port Everglades was read again on October 7, 2026, twice and minutes apart, after Tariff No. 12 was reissued on October 1, 2026. The port’s own pages and its tariff page are the places to confirm any of them before the trip. Every October 1, the first day of its fiscal year, the county reissues its port tariff, while shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Six questions drivers ask about dropping off at Port Everglades

The answers below come from the same readings as the tables above, taken in September 2026 and repeated on October 7, 2026: the Port Everglades security, parking, Getting Here, Arriving and Departing, cruise FAQ and parking map pages.

A port that put clocks on its gates and named a gate for two doors out of eight

The county did the harder half of this job. It numbered its three checkpoints, published an opening schedule for each, and put a closest entrance into the records for Cruise Terminal 2 and Cruise Terminal 4. Those three lines of opening hours are the most useful thing on any Port Everglades page for a driver deciding when to leave the house.

What it did not do is put those two facts on the same page as each other, or extend the second one past the Heron Garage. The hours live on a security page, the entrance names live inside a parking map, the eight addresses live on eight terminal pages, and the page called Getting Here carries none of the three. A driver bound for Cruise Terminal 21 at 5:30AM has to open three separate Port Everglades pages to learn that only one gate is open.

The gate that answers is almost always Eller Drive. Not because Broward County recommended it, but because it is the only entrance whose hours never rule it out.

Related guides

• The eight Port Everglades terminals, their garages and their gates
• What a week in a Port Everglades garage costs at the $25.00 cap
• Which terminal each Port Everglades cruise line publishes
• Dropping off at PortMiami through a tunnel and a bridge
• Port Everglades and PortMiami compared on price and clearance

One Broward County bus route crosses the gap Brightline and Port Everglades both leave blank

Broward County Transit Route 40 runs all week from Broward Central Terminal to SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd, the corner Port Everglades names as one of its three entrances. The published fare is $2.00 in cash. Neither Brightline nor the port publishes any other way to cross.

Brightline Fort Lauderdale Station stands at 101 NW 2nd Avenue, and Port Everglades runs eight numbered cruise terminals behind three gated entrances. Both issuers assert that the two are connected. The cruise page Brightline keeps prints a double headed arrow between the station name and the port name. The port’s own cruise FAQ tells guests that “the port is accessible by car, taxi, ride-share, bus and rail.” Neither sentence carries a mode, a distance, a duration or a fare.

Everything below was read in September 2026 against one fixed trip: two adults stepping off a train at Fort Lauderdale on embarkation morning with a checked bag each, sailing seven nights. The rows with no price in them are the finding, not a gap in the reading.

How you leave Brightline Fort Lauderdale Station	What the issuer publishes	Published cost for two adults	Where the published leg ends	Best for
Route 40 eastbound, Broward County Transit	An all week timetable with timepoint 6 at SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd, and a $2.00 cash fare (Broward County Transit)	$4.00	The corner Port Everglades calls its SE 17th St. entrance	Two adults with carry-on bags and a morning to spend
Brightline Airport Connector Shuttle to FLL, then a taxi	$12 per Guest plus a $3 fuel surcharge (Brightline) and an average taxi fare of $18 to $21 (Port Everglades)	$48.00 to $51.00	The terminal curb, by way of the airport	A party that wants every leg priced before it books
Taxi from the station curb	Metered rate only, and “Flat rates are NOT allowed” on port property (Port Everglades)	Not published by any issuer	The terminal curb named on the boarding document	Four suitcases and an assigned check-in time
Rideshare from the station	A heading called “Taxi and ride-shares” with a taxi fare under it and no rideshare fare (Port Everglades)	Not published by any issuer	Not published by any issuer	One traveler taking the price the app sets that morning
A Brightline vehicle to the port	Nothing. The company has published the word “near” once, in a press release dated February 20, 2024	No such service is sold	No such service is sold	Nobody, which is why the row is printed

Brightline has published exactly one word about the distance to Port Everglades

The Get To Your Cruise page works by pairing. MiamiCentral goes with Port Miami, Fort Lauderdale with Port Everglades, West Palm Beach with Port of Palm Beach, and Orlando with Port Canaveral. Under those four lines sits a single operating instruction, and it concerns the train: guests are encouraged to arrive at the station at least 30 minutes before departure to check baggage. Nothing on the page describes a crossing.

The one prose sentence Brightline has written about this port is two years old. Its press release of February 20, 2024 states that “Cruise Ports near Brightline stations include Port Miami, Port Everglades and Port of Palm Beach,” and the vehicle it offered was Brightline+, a complimentary door to port ride bundled with a PREMIUM ticket. That product has no page in September 2026: three plausible addresses for Brightline+ all return 404. The word “near” is the entire published measurement, and the same release describes a real mechanism for a different port, telling Port Canaveral passengers to connect to cruise line transportation at Orlando International Airport.

The company can write a walking figure when it wants one. Its Orlando station page tells guests that shared shuttles drop at Terminal C, “just a 13-minute walk to the train station,” and prices three surface lots at $20 a day. Compare that with what the company publishes about the last leg into the eight numbered terminals Broward County operates at Port Everglades, which is nothing at all: the Fort Lauderdale station page contains no occurrence of the words port, cruise or Everglades.

The only rail page on the Port Everglades website belongs to freight

Port Everglades makes the rail claim twice and documents it once. The Getting Here page opens by calling the port “easily accessible by car, taxi, bus, train and ship.” The cruise FAQ swaps ship for ride-share and keeps rail on the list. Then the page structure gives the game away: Getting Here carries headings for airport transfer, taxi and ride-shares, hotel transfers, Broward County Transit and rental cars, and no heading for rail at all.

Follow the site’s only Rail link and it lands under Cargo. The page describes a 43-acre near-dock Intermodal Container Transfer Facility operated by Florida East Coast Railway, with 9,000 feet of processing track, 12,000 feet of storage track, three rubber-tired gantry cranes and 508 cargo trailer parking spaces, built to divert an estimated 180,000 trucks from the roads by 2029. It is a serious piece of infrastructure and it moves boxes.

The bus entry is thinner than it looks too. The port writes that “local bus service stops at the Northport section of Port Everglades on SE 17th St., just north of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center,” gives the rider information line as 954-357-8400, and never prints a route number, a fare or a frequency. Everything useful about that bus sits on a Broward County Transit page the port does not quote.

Timepoint 6 on Route 40 is the corner the port calls an entrance

Route 40 carries an all week schedule from Broward County Transit, effective October 26, 2025, running from Lauderhill Transit Center to The Galleria at Fort Lauderdale via Sistrunk Boulevard, the 17 Street Causeway and A1A. Its eastbound timepoint 6 is SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd. Port Everglades lists “SE 17th St., located at Eisenhower Blvd.” as the first of its three entrances. The county’s bus timetable and the port’s gate list name the same intersection, and neither page mentions the other.

Route 40 eastbound timepoint	Number on the Broward County Transit map	First Monday to Friday time published	What the issuers put at that point
Lauderhill Transit Center	1	5:30a	1359 NW 40th Avenue, Lauderhill, one of four Broward County Transit transfer terminals
Sunrise Blvd. and NW 31 Ave.	2	5:40a	A street timepoint with no facility named against it
Broward Central Terminal arrival	3	5:55a	101 NW 1 Avenue, Fort Lauderdale 33301, fourteen numbered routes plus the US 1 Breeze
Broward Central Terminal departure	3	6:00a	The same building, timed separately so riders can plan a transfer
SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd	6	6:14a	The Port Everglades entrance where photo ID and cruise documents are checked

Reading down the Broward Central Terminal departure column and across to timepoint 6, the published Monday to Friday leg runs 14 to 17 minutes. After timepoint 6 the route carries on east to SE 20 St. and Ocean Dr at Points of America and ends at the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale. Both Port Everglades and the Broward County Convention Center appear among the route’s points of interest, and neither is a timepoint: the timed stop is a street corner. The two directions do not even use the same corner. Westbound, the 17th Street timepoint is SE 17 St. and SE 15 Ave., a different intersection from the one the port names as its entrance, so the stop that brought you in is not the stop that takes you back.

The fare is the easiest figure on this whole trip and the easiest to get wrong at the farebox. The county prices a one-way adult cash fare at $2, an All Day Pass at $5 and a 10 Ride at $20, and states that “when boarding the bus, exact fare is required. Operators do not carry change.” Two adults reaching the gate corner therefore spend $4.00, against the $175.00 that seven nights at the $25.00 daily maximum Broward County charges inside the port since October 1, 2026 would cost the same party in a car.

Two Fort Lauderdale rail stations, and only one shares a block with the bus

South Florida has two passenger rail operators and both call a station Fort Lauderdale. For Brightline that address is 101 NW 2nd Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33311, in ZIP code 33311. The commuter railroad keeps its Fort Lauderdale station in a different quadrant of the city, and its own site is not among the sources behind this guide, so nothing here is attributed to it.

The bus map decides which station matters here, and it is the county’s. Fourteen numbered routes plus the US 1 Breeze are shown at Broward Central Terminal, 101 NW 1 Avenue, Route 40 among them, and Route 40 is the only one timed at an entrance the port lists. The Brightline station sits one avenue from that terminal. Same house number, different avenue, and the rail station that stands next to the bus reaching the gate is the one this guide can document.

The county also publishes that terminal building’s own hours as Monday through Friday 6AM to 8PM and Saturday and Sunday 8:45AM to 4:45PM. Those hours describe a facility, not a route. The same agency prints Route 40 as an ALL WEEK schedule with separate Monday to Friday, Saturday and Sunday timetables out of that terminal, so a rider who reads the building hours as the bus hours will write off a weekend departure that the timetable actually lists.

The one station Brightline ties to a cruise port publishes five day hours

Every Brightline station page carries a line called Station Hours of Operation. Five of the six read Mon – Sun. Fort Lauderdale reads Mon – Fri: 5:45 AM – Last Train Departure, and it reads that way twice, once on the station page and once inside the four station panel at the foot of the cruise page itself.

Station on the Brightline network	Address the company publishes	Station hours the company publishes	Daily parking rate the company publishes
Fort Lauderdale	101 NW 2nd Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33311	Mon – Fri: 5:45 AM – Last Train Departure	No rate on the page, only a gateless garage and QR codes on the signs
MiamiCentral	600 NW 1st Avenue, Miami, FL 33136	Mon – Sun: 5:00 AM – Last Train Departure	$12 pre-purchased and $20 walk-up in one block, $7 pre-purchased on the app and $20 walk-up in another
West Palm Beach	260 Quadrille Plaza Drive, West Palm Beach, FL 33401	Mon – Sun: 5:20 AM – Last Train Departure	No rate on the page
Boca Raton	101 NW 4th St., Boca Raton, FL 33432	Mon – Sun: 5:30 AM – Last Train Departure	No rate on the page
Aventura	19796 West Dixie Highway, Miami, FL 33180	Mon – Sun: 5:00 AM – Last Train Departure	No rate on the page
Orlando	10705 Jeff Fuqua Blvd, Orlando, FL 32827	Mon – Sun: 4:30 AM – Last Train Departure	$20 a day at three surface lots, and under $10 a day at an off-airport operator it names

Whether that building genuinely locks on a Saturday is not something Brightline settles anywhere, and its own pages argue the other way: the Airport Connector Shuttle out of the same station is published as Mon-Sun 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM. The consequence is still real for planning, because of what Broward County Aviation publishes alongside it. Writing about return flights, the county names cruise days at Port Everglades as “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.” Two of those four days fall outside the only station hours Brightline prints, at the one station the company pairs with a cruise port.

What two adults actually pay leaving the platform on sailing morning

Four arrivals, four winners, one set of premises: two adults, an assigned check-in time, a seven night sailing, and every figure read in September 2026.

Two adults with carry-on bags go to Route 40, and it wins on price by a factor of twelve or more. Four dollars in exact cash against $48.00 to $51.00 for the connector and taxi chain is not a close call. The nuance is where the win stops: the bus ends at a security checkpoint where everyone 18 and older must show government-issued photo ID and cruise documents, and no issuer publishes a walking distance from that corner to Cruise Terminal 2, 4, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26 or 29.

A party with four suitcases goes to the taxi, and wins on the only criterion anyone documents. Porters at Port Everglades deliver bags “to private cars, taxis and limousines,” by the port’s own description, and that is a category a bus rider does not occupy. The nuance is the price: taxis on port property run on the meter, flat rates are explicitly not allowed, and the only fare band the port prints starts at the airport rather than at a rail station.

A traveler already committed to routing through the airport goes to the connector, and wins on documentation. Its shuttle costs $12 per Guest plus a $3 fuel surcharge with a same-day fare ticket, and the port prices the onward taxi at $18 to $21 regardless of party size, so every leg of that chain carries a number. The nuance is that the chain doubles back: it pays $30.00 to reach an airport the port itself measures at 1.8 miles away, and then buys a second ride to cover those 1.8 miles. The last stretch is worked through in the account of what Broward County and Port Everglades each charge for the 1.8 miles from FLL.

A Saturday or Sunday sailing goes to Route 40 by default, because it is the only one of the two operators with a weekend line in print. The county publishes a seven day timetable for the route. The railroad publishes Monday to Friday for the station, a Monday to Sunday shuttle out of it, and no reconciliation of the two anywhere a passenger can read.

Details on these pages that decide a rail plan to Port Everglades

• Brightline publishes two different addresses for its own Fort Lauderdale station: 101 NW 2nd Avenue on the station and cruise pages, and 300 NW 2nd St on the Airport Connector Shuttles page. Both carry ZIP 33311.
• The connector’s FLL stops do not match between Brightline’s own pages. The station page sends Terminal 4 riders to Zone B; the connector page sends them to Ground Transportation Area 3, Zone F.
• Two issuers print the same shuttle’s hours backwards from each other. On the Broward County Aviation page it runs Monday through Sunday from 7AM to 8PM, with a note that the last shuttle departs the Terminal 3 stop at 8PM; Brightline says 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM.
• The county’s Brightline entry sends Terminal 2 riders to GTA-2, while an alert higher on the same page says GTA-2 has been closed until further notice since March 10, 2025. That closure names three affected services and the Brightline shuttle is not one of them, so both instructions are live at once.
• Broward County Aviation states flatly that “there are no free shuttles to the port,” and puts the drive from FLL at about 10 minutes, the only driving clock either Broward department publishes for this corridor.
• The port publishes distances to three airports and to no rail station: FLL at 1.8 miles, MIA at 27 miles and PBI (now President Donald J. Trump International, DJT) at 50 miles.
• Van on Demand, the port’s shared vehicle for parties of three or more, is priced from FLL at $11 per person, from MIA at $25 and from PBI at $45. There is no rail station entry, so the third passenger arithmetic that works from an airport has no station equivalent.

Where a train to Port Everglades stops being a plan

Booking a PREMIUM fare expecting a ride to the pier is the first failure, and a 2024 press release still live on Brightline’s own site invites it. The complimentary Brightline+ transfer belonged to that wave season; PREMIUM in September 2026 buys lounge access, a checked bag, priority boarding and a larger seat, and no vehicle beyond the platform.

Treating the Route 40 stop as the terminal is the second. Timepoint 6 is an intersection with a security checkpoint behind it, and the port’s own addresses show why the difference matters: its eight terminals are spread across SE 20th Street, SE 32nd Street, Eller Drive and SE 35th Street. Which building applies is decided by the cruise line, not by the county, as the reconstruction of which Port Everglades terminal each cruise line actually names sets out.

Planning the return on the outbound stop is the third. Eastbound the timepoint is SE 17 St. and Eisenhower Blvd; westbound it is SE 17 St. and SE 15 Ave. Passengers typically debark between 7 and 9AM by the port’s own account, carrying everything, and the port states that luggage cannot be left or stored on port property.

Arriving without exact change is the fourth, and it is the cheapest mistake on the list to avoid. Operators do not carry change, so a $20 bill buys one $2 ride and forfeits $18.

Assuming the station is open is the fifth. On a Saturday or Sunday sailing, the only station hours Brightline publishes for Fort Lauderdale do not cover the day of travel, and the company has not published a correction, an exception or a second line for the weekend on any page a passenger meets while booking a cruise.

How these Brightline, Broward County and Port Everglades figures were checked

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section. Parking rates usually change in January, shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

What riders ask before booking Brightline for a Port Everglades sailing

The answers below use the same September 2026 readings as the tables above, taken from Brightline, Broward County Transit, Broward County Aviation and Port Everglades.

The county wrote the timetable the railroad left blank

Brightline documents what it sells down to the door number, and the FLL connector proves it: three terminals, three zones, $12 per Guest plus a $3 fuel surcharge, departing 10 minutes after each train arrival. On the other side of the gap, every terminal the port operates is documented down to the square foot. The stretch between them belongs to neither, and the only party that has put a time and a price on it is Broward County Transit, on a bus timetable neither company links to.

That leaves the strongest published fact about this connection sitting where no cruise passenger would look for it. A rider can leave the Brightline platform, walk one avenue, board a $2 bus and reach a Port Everglades gate 14 minutes later, and can learn all of that only by opening a route schedule PDF that never uses the word cruise.

Related guides

• The same rail question at PortMiami, where a free trolley fills the gap
• What a Fort Lauderdale park and cruise package has to beat
• Hotels near Port Everglades, measured against what Broward County publishes
• Port Everglades against PortMiami on tax, clearance and terminals

What Broward County publishes about a rental car at Port Everglades

Port Everglades names no rental company and runs no counter of its own. Broward County Aviation publishes 12 counters at 600 Terminal Drive, 1.8 miles away, with every opening hour printed. Between the building and the ship sits one published vehicle, a $2 city bus with no cruise terminal on its timetable.

Two arms of the same county government hold the two halves of this trip. One of them measures the gap and prices the parking a returned car makes unnecessary. Another prints twelve telephone numbers, twelve floor levels and twelve sets of hours. Neither prints a fare, a curb or a clock for the mile and a half in between.

Every figure below was read in September 2026, and again on October 7, 2026, from the department that sets it: the Port Everglades cruise pages, the Broward County Aviation pages stamped July 23 and July 29, 2026, Port Everglades Tariff No. 12, and the Broward County Transit Route 1 timetable effective October 26, 2025. No rental company website was opened for this guide, and the reason is set out further down.

What a renter needs to know	Port Everglades (Broward County)	Broward County Aviation Department (FLL)
Rental counters on the property	None, and no company named anywhere on the cruise pages	12 companies inside the Rental Car Center, listed by name
Address of the nearest counters	Not published; the port links to the airport instead	600 Terminal Drive, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33315
Opening hours	Not published	Printed per company, from 4 AM to 2 AM through 24/7
Shuttle from the cruise terminals	Some firms provide one, with no name, curb, fee or time	Courtesy shuttles only operate between the Rental Car Center and the Terminals
Free ride to the port	n/a	There are no free shuttles to the port
Fare for the airport to port leg	Average taxi fare is $18 – $21	$12 (estimated) on the cruise page, $18-$21 on the rate table
What the county charges the rental firm	$5.50 per contract for customers picked up at the port	Not published on any aviation page

Only one row of that table has the same figure on both sides, and it is the one about a taxi neither department calls a rental service.

The paragraph Port Everglades prints under the heading Rental cars

Under a heading that reads Rental cars, the port writes three sentences and stops. The Rental Car Center at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport houses a large number of rental car companies in one location. There are also car rental firms licensed to do business at Port Everglades that are not located at FLL. Some provide shuttle services from cruise terminals to their nearby rental locations.

Read as an instruction, that paragraph has four holes. It gives no company name, no address for the nearby locations, no fee, and no hour. It also stops short of saying which of the eight cruise terminals a shuttle would collect from, and the port never treats those eight as interchangeable: Cruise Terminal 2 sits at 1801 SE 20th Street and Cruise Terminal 29 at 2200 SE 35th Street, with 18, 19, 21, 25 and 26 spread across Eller Drive and SE 32nd Street. Which of those addresses a passenger stands at is decided by the ship, as the layout of the eight numbered terminals and the gates in front of them makes clear.

Its one hyperlink does not survive either. The words Rental Car Center in that paragraph point at broward.org/airport/Passengers/Transportation/Pages/rentalcars.aspx, and that address returned HTTP 301 to the airport home page when it was requested on September 5, 2026, and again on October 7, 2026. A reader who clicks it lands on flight arrivals, not on a counter list.

A working version of the same page exists. It sits at a shorter path on the same county site, and it is worth reaching, because it is the only place in Broward County where the hours are written down.

Twelve counters at 600 Terminal Drive, and every opening hour printed

Inside one building next to Terminal 1, Broward County Aviation lists 12 rental companies with a telephone number, a floor level and a set of operating hours for each. That combination does not exist at the other two big South Florida cruise ports.

Company, as Broward County Aviation lists it	Level inside the Rental Car Center	Hours of operation the county prints	Open when a ship debarks at 7 AM
Ace	Level 3	24/7	Yes
Alamo	Level 2	5 AM to Midnight	Yes
Avis	Level 3	24/7	Yes
Budget	Level 4	24/7	Yes
Dollar	Level 4	4 AM to 1 AM	Yes
Enterprise	Level 2	5 AM to Midnight	Yes
Fox	Level 3	5 AM to 1 AM	Yes
Hertz	Level 3	4 AM to 2 AM	Yes
National	Level 2	5 AM to Midnight	Yes
Payless	Level 3	24/7	Yes
Sixt	Level 4	6 AM to Midnight	Yes
Thrifty	Level 4	4 AM to 1 AM	Yes

Line up that last column against the port’s own clock and the counter stops being the problem. Passengers typically debark the ship between 7 and 9AM, Port Everglades states, and the latest of the twelve to raise its shutter does so at 6 AM. Four of them never close. The earliest closing time in the building is midnight, so an evening sailing leaves the return side just as comfortable.

Miami runs the opposite way. Miami International Airport recommends following up with your rental car company directly to confirm their hours of operation, on a page stamped Updated Dec. 2022, while Miami-Dade County names Dollar Rent-A-Car and Hertz Rent-A-Car as the two firms shuttling from the port and states that there are no on-site car rental agencies at PortMiami. That asymmetry is worked through in the debarkation-morning case at PortMiami and its 7.1 mile gap. Fort Lauderdale prints the hours and no company at the port; Miami prints two companies at the port and no hours.

Ten more firms appear on the same airport page as off-site operators, among them Easirent, Green Motion and ZezGo, reached by walking to Zone G for a courtesy shuttle. A courtesy phone sits between bus stop number 6 and Zone G. None of those ten is described as serving a cruise terminal either.

$5.50 per contract, the price Broward County puts on a pickup it will not name

Item No. 800 of Port Everglades Tariff No. 12, Issue No. 8, effective October 1, 2026, settles the question of whether those port shuttles exist. Companies conducting or engaging in motor vehicle rental business or services at Port Everglades must remit five dollars and fifty cents per contract, payable monthly, for customers picked up at Port Everglades.

Money changes hands, so pickups happen. Each firm has to file with the Port Everglades Department’s Finance Division by the fifteenth of each month, with a statement certified by one of the company’s officers setting out how many rental contracts it secured through its operations at the port. That filing means the county knows the exact number of cruise passengers collected at a terminal last month, and publishes neither the number nor the names behind it.

Set that against the neighboring county and the two charging models invert. Miami-Dade prices the same activity as a flat business permit, item 714, at $500.00 a year for Car Rentals, Courtesy Shuttle Services, plus 8% of gross revenues from any rental company operating without a non-exclusive license agreement. At $5.50 a contract, a firm would need 91 pickups at Port Everglades in a year before it matched PortMiami’s flat annual fee. Per-contract billing scales with the number of cruise passengers collected; a flat annual permit does not move at all.

One published detail does help a passenger spot the vehicle. Firms authorized to do business in Port Everglades under a business permit or franchise must purchase identifying emblems at a cost of $15.00 each, to be displayed on their vehicles and by their personnel. The emblem is the only physical marker the county describes; the list of who carries it is not published anywhere on the port site.

Every published leg between a Port Everglades gangway and a rental counter

Five vehicles have a published existence between the Rental Car Center and a Port Everglades gangway, and they are priced by four different offices. Two of them start at a cruise terminal, one at an airport terminal, and two inside the Rental Car Center itself. A sixth appears only in the tariff.

Mode, as its issuer names it	Published price	Where it actually starts	Limit the issuer prints	Best for
RCC courtesy shuttle	Free	Rental Car Center, level 3, and the lower level at all four airport terminals	Only operates between the Rental Car Center and the Terminals	Getting from the counter to an airport curb, every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day
Broward County Transit Route 1	$2 one-way cash fare, $5 all day pass	Upper departure level of the Rental Car Center, Stop G	Exact fare required, operators do not carry change	The only priced vehicle whose airport stop is the rental building
Taxi cab, airport estimate	$12 (estimated) on the meter	Taxi podium at each of the four airport terminals	Up to five people on one meter	Budgeting the floor for a party of 1 to 5
Taxi cab, port estimate	$18 – $21 average	Terminal curb, both directions	Metered rate only, flat rates are NOT allowed	Budgeting the ceiling, which is the safer number
Van on Demand	$11 per person to FLL	Gray and blue booth outside each cruise terminal	Parties of 3 or more, not available on all sailing days	A debarking party of three or more with no cab on the stand
Rental company courtesy shuttle	Not published by any issuer	Not published by any issuer	$5.50 per contract remitted to Broward County	Nothing that can be checked before the ship lands

The Van on Demand seat price and the two disagreeing taxi figures belong to the 1.8 mile transfer that Broward County prices twice, where the $9 spread between two county pages is taken apart in full. Here they matter only as the fares a returned car forces a passenger to pay.

Where the 1.8 miles stops being 1.8 miles, in both directions

Neither published taxi figure was measured from 600 Terminal Drive. Both were measured from an airport terminal curb, and the Rental Car Center is a separate building reached by a shuttle or a pedestrian bridge. That difference is the whole subject of this guide.

Embarkation runs like this. A driver returns the car at the Rental Car Center, boards the courtesy shuttle that runs every 10 minutes around the clock, and rides to Terminal 1 by the level 2 pedestrian bridge or to Terminals 2, 3 or 4 by bus. Only at that curb does a priced vehicle appear: a taxi at $12 to $21, or a shared ride. From there comes a security checkpoint where everyone aged 18 or older shows a government-issued photo ID and cruise documents, no weapons under Florida State Statute 311.12(3b), and vehicles subject to search. Then one of eight street addresses.

Debarkation runs the same chain backwards with a tighter clock. Off the ship between 7 and 9AM, a passenger finds two priced options on the port’s own terminal pages, a taxi at $18 – $21 and Van on Demand at $11 per person for parties of three or more. Both drop at an airport terminal. The RCC courtesy shuttle then covers the last hop, and the counter is already open, because all twelve are.

What no issuer covers is the hop itself when it happens outside those two chains. Taxi podiums appear at the four airport terminals in the aviation department’s own list, and ride-share zones at Zone Z, GTA-2 and the Palm Garage, while the Rental Car Center appears in neither. That same department writes that there are no free shuttles to the port and that a passenger who did not pre-arrange has two options, shared ride and taxi cab.

Winner for a party of two returning a car on sailing day: the courtesy shuttle to a terminal curb, then a cab. Criterion is published availability, since the shuttle runs 24 hours a day and the taxi podiums are printed for all four terminals. The nuance is cost, because the cab meter starts at the airport rather than at the counter.

Winner on published cost for that same leg: Broward County Transit Route 1, at $2 a head. Criterion is that its airport stop is inside the rental building, on the upper departure level, marked Stop G, which no other priced vehicle can claim. The nuance is severe: its six timepoints are Aventura Mall, US 1 and Hallandale Beach Boulevard, Young Circle, the airport, Broward Health Medical Center and Broward Central Terminal, and not one of them is a cruise terminal.

Winner for anyone who never rents at all: leaving the car in a port garage and paying the barrier. That is a different calculation, and the number it produces is the reason the rest of this page exists.

What seven nights of port parking costs, and what a returned car erases

A Port Everglades parking day is capped at $25.00 since October 1, 2026, and item 1135 of Tariff No. 12 states that all parking fees include sales taxes, so nothing is added at the barrier. Seven nights is $175.00 exactly. Oversized vehicles carry a $30.00 daily maximum in item 1135 and $35 on the parking page, the port accepts no reservations or pre-payment, and all daily rates begin when you pull the parking ticket.

That $175.00 is the only figure both halves of this decision publish in the same currency. A pair of adults in a cab spends $24 to $42 across the two trips, depending on which county page they believe. The same pair on Route 1 spends $8, under 5% of the garage bill, and buys a walk at the far end, since the port puts its bus service at Northport on SE 17th Street and no cruise terminal is a Route 1 timepoint. The full rate ladder behind the ceiling, which the parking page now prints in full, sits in the breakdown of the $25.00 daily maximum and the six parking facilities.

Timing changes the sum in one direction only. Since the day starts when the ticket comes out of the machine rather than at midnight, a car dropped at 4 PM on a Saturday and collected at 8 AM the following Saturday crosses seven ticket days, not six. Nobody who returned the car at 600 Terminal Drive pays any of it.

Details on the Broward pages that decide a Port Everglades rental

• Free cell phone waiting lots exist for the people collecting a debarking passenger, at the Port Administration Building, 1850 Eller Drive, just past the security checkpoint, and at the lot north of Cruise Terminal 18. A rental shuttle has no published equivalent.
• Porter service reaches only three kinds of vehicle. Porters hired by the cruise line deliver bags to private cars, taxis and limousines, in the port’s own wording, and a rental company van is none of the three.
• The airport’s own cruise page recommends a rental and then lists ways to the port that exclude one. Consider renting a car and exploring beautiful South Florida, it says under Car Rentals, on a page whose Port Everglades section offers shared ride and taxi cab only.
• That same Car Rentals block ends with a colon and nothing after it. The sentence These car rental companies are located in the RCC introduces a list that is absent from the page, which carries an Updated Jul 29, 2026 stamp.
• Cruise days at FLL are named, and they are Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Many returning passengers arrive at 8:30 a.m. for flights scheduled throughout the day, Broward County Aviation writes, which is the same window in which a rental counter queue forms.
• Only the airport end of this trip takes a bag. Public Baggage Storage is available in all FLL terminals on 954-359-5505, in Broward County Aviation’s words, while no storage or locker appears anywhere on the Port Everglades cruise pages.
• Two addresses circulate for the same airport. The rental page header reads 100 Terminal Drive, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33315, while the cruise page tells travelers to enter 100 Aviation Blvd, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33315 when searching for hotels.
• Cruise Services at Port Everglades answers on 954-468-3720 and the airport Ground Transportation Office on 1-866-435-9355, option 3. Neither number is printed beside a rental company name.

Where a Port Everglades rental plan breaks before the gangway

Treating 1.8 miles as the whole trip is the first failure. That measurement runs airport to port, and a renter starts at a separate building whose only published departures are a courtesy shuttle to four airport terminals and a city bus. Two extra transfers hide inside a distance that looks like a single hop.

Waiting at a cruise terminal for a rental shuttle is the second. A shuttle from cruise terminals does appear in the port’s own wording, and Tariff No. 12 collects $5.50 per contract from the firms that run one, yet every one of the eight terminal transportation pages lists exactly two vehicles at the curb, a taxi and Van on Demand. The walking directions on those pages are precise to the pavilion and say nothing about where a rental van stands.

Booking a cruise line coach after landing is the third. A cruise line representative meets pre-arranged passengers in the baggage claim area, and Broward County Aviation states that you cannot use the ship’s transportation unless you made a reservation prior to arriving at the airport. Returning a car does not create that reservation.

Assuming the counter decides the schedule is the fourth. In Miami it might, because Miami International Airport prints no hour for any individual counter and says only that its building runs 24 hours a day, with some operators closed between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. At Fort Lauderdale the twelve hour ranges are printed, the earliest opening is 4 AM and the latest is 6 AM, and both fall before the 7 AM floor of the port’s own debarkation window.

Counting the garage bill in nights is the last one. Since the clock starts when the ticket comes out, an afternoon drop-off and a morning collection a week later crosses seven $25.00 days rather than six, and the $175.00 total is what a returned car is actually competing against.

How these Port Everglades and Broward County figures were checked

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section, and every figure credited to Broward County or Port Everglades was read again on October 7, 2026, twice and minutes apart, after Tariff No. 12 was reissued on October 1, 2026. Confirm a rate on the Port Everglades parking page or in item 1135 before driving in. Every October 1, the first day of its fiscal year, the county reissues its port tariff, while shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Rental companies are private issuers, so their own websites, rates, opening hours and shuttle policies are not read or repeated here. Every company name, telephone number and hour above was taken from a Broward County page, and every fee from Port Everglades Tariff No. 12.

Six questions about renting or returning a car at Port Everglades

The answers below come from the Port Everglades cruise pages and Tariff No. 12 Item No. 800, the Broward County Aviation pages stamped July 23 and July 29, 2026, and the Broward County Transit Route 1 timetable effective October 26, 2025, read in September 2026 and again on October 7, 2026.

A county that prices the pickup and will not describe it

Broward County knows how many cruise passengers a rental firm collected at Port Everglades last month, to the contract, because $5.50 of each one reaches its Finance Division by the fifteenth. It knows which firms hold the permit, because it requires each of them to buy $15.00 identifying emblems for their vans. It publishes 12 counters, 12 telephone numbers and 12 sets of hours a mile and a half away, and it will not publish a curb.

So the shortest airport to port gap in Florida turns out to be the one with the most transfers inside it. Distance was never the constraint here.

Related guides

• The 1.8 miles from FLL to Port Everglades, priced by both county departments
• Port Everglades parking rates and the $25.00 daily ceiling
• Picking up a rental car after a PortMiami cruise
• Port Everglades terminal by terminal, with garages and gates

Twelve sections of the Port Everglades tariff, and no line for the van that collects you

No Broward County document prices the van that collects a cruise passenger from a lot outside Port Everglades, and no permit category names parking. The only figure the county fixes is inside the gate: $25.00 a day with sales tax included, which is $75.00 on a three night sailing, $175.00 on seven and $350.00 on fourteen.

Off-site parking at Port Everglades is a business Broward County neither prices nor licenses, which leaves the traveler with one published side and one private side. Every dollar in an outside quote comes from the company quoting it. This site does not verify the websites of private parking companies, because their rates, hours and shuttle frequencies are set by the seller and filed with nobody.

What Broward County does file is the money that moves around that gap. There is a rate for a space inside the fence, a fee for a crane and for a food truck, a remittance a rental car company owes on a customer collected at the port, and an office that issues the permit for a taxi. Laid side by side, four published lines make the fifth one visible by its absence.

Cost inside a Fort Lauderdale cruise parking booking	Who sets it	Published figure	Where the figure is filed
A parking space inside Port Everglades	Broward County Port Everglades Department	$25.00 per day, sales taxes included	Tariff No. 12, item 1135, effective October 1, 2026
A business permit for crane service or mobile food and drink service	Broward County	$300.00 initial processing plus $350.00 a year	Tariff No. 12, item 800, effective October 1, 2026
A rental car company collecting a customer at the port	Broward County	$5.50 per rental contract, remitted monthly	Tariff No. 12, item 800
A taxi, limousine or bus permit for Port Everglades	Broward County Consumer Protection Division	Not printed in the port tariff	Broward County Administrative Code, Chapter 32, Part III
An off-site parking space and the shuttle that serves it	The operator alone	No county figure exists	Filed nowhere

Four of those five lines can be checked before a deposit is paid. The fifth cannot.

The two business permits Broward County issues at Port Everglades

Item 800 of Port Everglades Tariff No. 12, effective October 1, 2026, names exactly two activities that require a business permit: crane service and mobile motorized food and drink service. Each costs $300.00 in initial processing and $350.00 a year. Firms authorized under a permit or a franchise buy identifying emblems at $15.00 each for their vehicles and their personnel.

The rest of item 800 is maritime, and the ladder is steep. A tugboat or towing franchise costs $27,300.00 in initial processing with an annual fee set by contract. A stevedore or cargo handler franchise costs $11,550.00 plus $4,200.00 a year. Steamship agent, vessel bunkering, vessel oily waste removal, vessel sanitary wastewater removal and marine terminal security each cost $4,200.00 plus $2,360.00 a year.

The opening sentence of the item is what decides the question for an outside lot. It reads that no one may engage in the business or provide services at Port Everglades within any of the listed categories without obtaining a franchise or business permit. The list is closed. A company storing cars outside the fence and running a van to a terminal door falls into none of the ten categories priced, and Broward County adds no catch-all line for anything else.

Two more details sharpen the picture. The port’s own business forms page states plainly that parking privileges are not included with a business permit, so even a permitted crane operator gets no space out of one. And item 805 sets the insurance floor for every business permit at commercial general liability of $500,000.00 per occurrence and automobile liability of $500,000.00 per occurrence, with a Florida certificate of self-insurance expressly not acceptable as evidence. Permits at Port Everglades are cheap and narrow.

Section Eleven of Tariff No. 12 runs to eight items and not one is an entry fee

Section Eleven of Port Everglades Tariff No. 12, headed Miscellaneous Rates and Fees, contains eight items and only one of them touches a passenger car. The eight are harbormaster fees, linehandler fees, labor and equipment fees, potable water and hose rental and hook-up fees, surcharges for use of facilities, the electric service fee, parking fees at item 1135, and grid yard areas at item 1140.

Item 1135 is the whole of what a driver pays. It caps a day at $25.00, states that all parking fees include sales taxes, and refuses vehicles over twenty feet in length. An oversized vehicle that exceeds the standard width or height of a space pays $18.00 for the first five hours and $30.00 for up to twenty-four, per entry, while the parking page prints $35 for that day. The full ladder underneath that ceiling, and the arithmetic that lands a seven night sailing on $175.00, sits with the eight hourly steps Broward County files for its own garages and lots.

Read across all twelve sections and 129 numbered items, the tariff never uses the words shuttle, taxi, limousine or ground transportation. Its only item titled Access to Port Everglades is item 205, and that one governs ships: berth applications filed at least seventy-two hours before arrival, twenty-four hours of advance notice of arrival time, with daily cruise operations exempt from both. Broward County wrote an access rule for vessels and none for vehicles.

The absence is not an oversight in a hurried document. Tariff No. 12 was last issued on October 1, 2026 and is filed electronically with the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission, a regime that rewards naming every charge a port intends to collect. A charge that is absent from the tariff is a charge the port never filed.

The same lot at three Florida cruise ports, priced three different ways

Three Florida ports host the same business and treat it three different ways, and the gap between those treatments is wider than the gap between their parking rates. The Canaveral Port Authority licenses the operator by name, Miami-Dade County licenses the vehicle and bills each crossing, and Broward County does neither.

Cruise port and issuer	Permit class that names off-port parking	What the port bills the van	Cost of becoming a permitted operator	Public register of holders
Port Canaveral, Canaveral Port Authority	Off-Port Parking Operator, one of seven classes	$5.00 per 60 minute increment for a Class I vehicle up to 23 feet	$50.00 non-refundable application fee, insurance of at least $1,000,000	Not published
PortMiami, Miami-Dade County	None; the nearest line is Pre-arranged Ground Transportation	$4.50 per entry on a pre-paid account, $6.00 without one	$350.00 a year, $400.00 initial processing, $12.50 for a transponder	PortMiami 2026 Directory, 413 companies under Ground Transportation Services
Port Everglades, Broward County	None; item 800 prices ten categories and parking is not one	No charge published anywhere in Tariff No. 12	No permit exists to buy for parking or for a shuttle	Not published

On checkability the winner is PortMiami, and the margin is not close: a driver there can confirm that a company holds a permit, in a document with page numbers, before paying anything. Miami-Dade County publishes that register precisely because it charges for the crossing, and the $350.00 annual permit and the $4.50 entry fee that produce it are the reason the list exists at all. Charging for access creates a record of who paid. Charging nothing creates no record.

The one off-port business Port Everglades does price is a rental car company

Motor vehicle rental companies remit $5.50 per contract to Broward County for customers picked up at Port Everglades, payable monthly by the fifteenth, with a statement certified by a company officer setting out how many contracts the firm secured through its operations at the port. The charge sits in item 800, beneath the franchise and permit schedule, and it is priced per customer rather than per crossing.

The same firms appear in Port Everglades prose aimed at passengers. Its Getting Here page notes that there are car rental firms licensed to do business at Port Everglades that are not located at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, and that some provide shuttle services from cruise terminals to their nearby rental locations. An off-port business, a van, a cruise terminal pickup, a filed fee.

That paragraph describes the exact shape of an off-site parking operation with one word changed. A mechanism for pricing an off-port company that sends a shuttle to a terminal already exists at Port Everglades, has applied to rental cars for longer than the current tariff issue has existed, and has never been extended to parking. At PortMiami the same activity is written as a percentage: rental car firms operating without a non-exclusive licence agreement are assessed 8% of the gross revenues from picking up passengers for transport to off-port rental facilities.

The difference in method is the difference in what a traveler can learn. A per-contract remittance records that a customer was collected. A per-entry fee records that a vehicle came through the gate. Parking at Port Everglades generates neither record.

The office that licenses a Port Everglades shuttle is a consumer regulator, not the port

The port hands vehicle licensing to another Broward County office. Its business forms page states that all taxi, limousine and bus services must obtain a Port Everglades Business Permit from Broward County’s Consumer Protection Division, and gives an address of 1 North University Drive, Box #302, Plantation, FL 33324, with a telephone number of 954-765-4400 extension 9376.

The division describes its own scope differently. Consumer Protection in Broward County lists the businesses it licenses and regulates as chauffeurs, taxis and for-hire vehicles, child care providers, emergency and non-emergency medical transport services, motor vehicle repair, body and paint shops, movers, and towing and immobilization. Parking sits on no line of that list. The office opens 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and gives 954-765-1700 for all regulated businesses.

Two Broward County pages therefore print two different rooms and two different numbers for the same permit. The port’s page says Box #302 with extension 9376; the division’s page says Suite 203 at 1 N. University Drive with 954-765-1700. A driver chasing a permit claim is being sent to the same building by two departments that do not agree on the suite.

What that means for a booking is narrow and useful. A van serving an outside lot may well hold a for-hire vehicle permit from Broward County, and such a permit covers the driver and the vehicle. It is not a parking approval, no Port Everglades document ties it to a lot, and no published roster exists to read it off.

What an outside quote has to beat at Port Everglades, and when it cannot

The number to beat is unusually clean because Broward County put the tax inside it. Seven nights at the $25.00 daily maximum is $175.00 in total, with no tax to add and no extra billed day, since the clock starts when the ticket comes out of the machine rather than on a calendar date. That is the entire on-port cost for a standard car.

In the favorable case, a fourteen night sailing, the on-port figure is $350.00 and an outside lot has real room to work in. In the normal case, seven nights at $175.00, an outside quote has to land materially under $175.00 for two adults to be better off, because the quote also buys a shuttle window and a handover of the keys. In the unfavorable case, a three night cruise at $75.00, almost nothing is left to save, and the same arithmetic decides what a Fort Lauderdale hotel’s included parking is actually worth.

Two groups gain nothing by leaving the gate at any price. Drivers with a DV licence plate issued under section 320.084 of the Florida Statutes, a Florida Toll Exemption permit, or a vehicle fitted with hand controls, lifts or ramps park free under item 1135, so every dollar spent outside is a dollar added rather than saved. Passengers sailing from Cruise Terminal 2 give up an air-conditioned elevated bridge with moving walkways that runs from the fifth floor of the 1,818-space Heron Garage straight into the building.

One comparison sits outside the parking question and settles it for anyone flying in. Port Everglades publishes 1.8 miles as the distance from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and an average metered taxi fare of $18 to $21, quoted as the total for the vehicle rather than per passenger, so a party that leaves the car at home pays $36 to $42 round trip against $175.00 to park for a week.

One group has the opposite problem and no county number at all. Item 1135 states that vehicles over twenty feet in length cannot be accommodated in the garages or surface lots, while the port’s parking page sets the oversized maximum at 24 feet. Anyone driving an RV or a trailer past either figure is choosing between an outside lot and not driving, and Broward County publishes nothing to compare that choice against.

Details of the Port Everglades gate that an outside booking inherits

Six published conditions apply to a shuttle van exactly as they apply to a private car.

• The van passes the same checkpoint. Port Everglades has three entrances, at SE 17th Street on Eisenhower Boulevard, State Road 84 just east of U.S. 1 at Spangler Boulevard, and I-595 East at Eller Drive, and each one requires government-issued photo ID from everyone 18 and older plus cruise documents, with vehicles subject to search and weapons barred under Florida State Statute 311.12(3b).
• One road does skip the checkpoints, and it does not help a cruise passenger. The Convention Center Connector opened on October 20, 2025 as an elevated bypass that Broward County describes as eliminating the need to pass through port security checkpoints, but it serves the convention center rather than any of the eight numbered cruise terminals.
• Nothing inside can be reserved. The county states that Port Everglades does not accept reservations or pre-payment for parking, which is the one product an outside lot can sell that the county declines to sell.
• Both garages are low. Heron Garage and Palm Garage each publish 7 feet of clearance, while Lot A with 770 spaces, Lot B with 404, Lot C with 600 and Lot D with 850 publish no height at all. Lots B, C and D sit beside Cruise Terminal 18, the largest building at the port at 259,370 square feet. A high-roof shuttle van is not a garage vehicle.
• The only shuttle Port Everglades describes is its own. The Cruise Terminal 29 page calls the service between that terminal and the Palm Parking Garage free, the parking page prints no fare for it, and no county page describes a port shuttle reaching a lot outside the fence.
• The port declines custody of luggage, stating that luggage cannot be left or stored at the port, which matters on the return leg when a van runs late. Which garage or lot serves each building sits with the eight numbered terminals and three gated entrances Broward County documents.

Where a Port Everglades off-site parking comparison goes wrong

Importing a Miami number is the first and largest error. A seven night sailing costs $212.00 at a $25.00 PortMiami terminal once Miami-Dade County adds the 6% its tariff names, against $175.00 at Port Everglades with the tax already inside. At the $35.00 PortMiami terminals the same eight billed days reach $296.80. Miami-Dade County publishes 25.7 miles between PortMiami and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, so the two ports sit inside a single drive, and the two bills differ by $37.00 on identical cars at the cheaper Miami rate and by $121.80 at the dearer one.

Counting an extra day is the second. PortMiami bills the day of entry and each succeeding day, so seven nights becomes eight billed days there. At Port Everglades the meter starts when the ticket is pulled, so seven nights is seven days of $25.00. Applying the Miami rule in Fort Lauderdale invents $25.00 that nobody charges.

Treating a claim of port approval as verifiable is the third. At PortMiami a permit appears in a published directory. At Port Everglades no register exists, item 800 offers no category to be listed under, and the only permit a shuttle can hold comes from a consumer regulator that does not license parking at all.

Expecting a shorter security queue is the fourth. A commercial van and a private car enter through the same three gates under the same identity check, so the time gained by going outside is the walk from a space to a terminal door, not the wait at a barrier.

How these Port Everglades and Broward County figures were checked

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section, and every figure credited to Broward County or Port Everglades was read again on October 7, 2026, twice and minutes apart, after Tariff No. 12 was reissued on October 1, 2026. The date on the reading still matters. Read strictly, the 6% reaches what the tariff prices. Item 710 prints $25.00 as its only long term rate and says the tariff’s rates exclude sales tax; the $35 line lives on the county’s parking page, so a total built on $35 plus 6% adds a tariff clause to a rate the tariff does not carry. Every October 1, the first day of its fiscal year, Broward County reissues its port tariff, while shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

Questions drivers ask about parking outside Port Everglades

The six answers below come from Port Everglades Tariff No. 12 last issued October 1, 2026, the port’s business forms and cruise parking pages, and the Broward County Consumer Protection Division page, read in September 2026 and again on October 7, 2026.

An unpriced business is not an unregulated road

In Tariff No. 12, Broward County prices a tugboat franchise at $27,300.00, a stevedore franchise at $11,550.00 and a food truck emblem at $15.00, and leaves off-port parking outside the document entirely. The effect on a traveler is not a cheaper shuttle, because the van pays nothing to enter and none of that saving shows up in a quote. The effect is that the part of a cruise budget easiest to verify at PortMiami is the part hardest to verify in Fort Lauderdale. A price the county sets can be read in a filed tariff; a price only a company sets can be read only by calling the company.

Related guides

• The eight hourly steps behind the $25.00 daily maximum at Port Everglades
• The permit and per-entry fee Miami-Dade County charges an off-site lot at PortMiami
• What a Fort Lauderdale park and cruise package has to beat once $175.00 is counted
• How Broward County numbers its eight cruise terminals and pairs each with a garage

Four Port Everglades buildings carry a Princess or Holland America number, and Broward County confirms three of them on its parking map

Broward County names a cruise line for seven of its eight Port Everglades buildings, on its parking map rather than its terminal pages. On that map, Cruise Terminal 2 is primarily used by Princess Cruises and Cruise Terminal 26 is primarily used by Holland America Line, read on 5 September 2026. Only Cruise Terminal 19 is left unnamed.

The eight terminal pages tell a smaller story. There Broward County attaches an operator to two buildings only, Cruise Terminal 4 for Disney Cruise Line and Cruise Terminal 25 for Celebrity Cruises, and its directory of ten cruise lines carries a phone number and a website with no terminal column at all. The parking map is the one county page that puts Princess Cruises and Holland America Line beside a building number in prose, and it hedges every entry with the word primarily and a warning that parking assignments may change. Holland America Line names three halls of its own; the map backs two of them.

What a driver needs before embarkation morning	Holland America Line publishes	Princess Cruises publishes	Broward County publishes
Terminal number	Cruise Terminals 26, 19 and 21, in prose	Cruise Terminal 2, on a blog page only	Cruise Terminal 2 to Princess, 26 to Holland America, 21 to both, on the parking map
Street address for that terminal	2026 Eller Dr., 2019 Eller Dr., 2021 Eller Dr.	1801 SE 20th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL	The same four street numbers, with two cities for 2026 Eller Drive
Pier assignment for a dated sailing	Not published for any sail date	Notified closer to the sail date, stated twice	Parking map records, which the port says may change on the day, plus a public berth board
Garage for that terminal	Palm Parking Garage, named, rate not printed	Heron Parking, 1,818 spaces	Palm 1,966 spaces, Heron 1,818 spaces, both 7 feet
Daily parking rate	Not printed, reader sent to porteverglades.net	A maximum of $20-$25 per day	$25 daily maximum since October 1, 2026, $30 oversized in the tariff and $35 on the parking page, taxes included
Distance to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport	Approximately 3 miles, 10 minutes	About 2 miles	1.8 miles, allow at least 45 minutes
Taxi fare from that airport	From $20 USD	$15 to $20, typically	Average taxi fare $18 to $21

One figure survives all three ranges in the last row. The floor Holland America Line prints is $20, the ceiling Princess Cruises prints is $20, and the county band of $18 to $21 contains both. A passenger who budgets exactly $20.00 for the ride from the airport is inside every published number on the table, which is not true of $18.00 or of $21.00.

Holland America Line puts 349,281 square feet of Port Everglades hall behind a single 7 foot garage roof

Cruise Terminals 26, 19 and 21 measure 115,581, 95,000 and 138,700 square feet on the Broward County pages that describe them. Added together the three come to 349,281 square feet, which is 33.7 percent of the 1,036,317 square feet the county measures across all eight buildings. All three park from the same structure.

The Palm Parking Garage holds 1,966 spaces at 7 feet of clearance and serves Cruise Terminals 19, 21, 25, 26 and 29. Divide the garage by the five buildings it feeds and each one gets 393 spaces on a day when all five sail. The Heron Parking Garage, which is where Princess Cruises sends a car, holds 1,818 spaces for two buildings, or 909 apiece. A Princess car therefore has 2.3 times as many garage spaces behind it as a Holland America car.

Check in capacity divides the same way. Counted from the same pages, the three halls carry 50 stations at Cruise Terminal 19, 50 at Cruise Terminal 21 and 25 at Cruise Terminal 26, which is 125 of the 371 stations across the port’s eight dossiers. That is 33.7 percent again, the same share as the floor area, which puts these three halls at the port’s own average density of desks per square foot rather than above or below it. The full county file on every one of the eight sits in the terminal by terminal reference for Port Everglades.

Only one of the three offers an alternative to the garage. The Cruise Terminal 19 page ends its parking line with secure parking in 400 space Parking Lot B or the 1,966 space Palm Garage, and it is also the only one of the three whose sentence omits the word covered. Wording on the 21 page says covered parking located next to Terminal 21, and the 26 page says covered parking without giving any distance at all. That same hall is also the only one of the three the county will not attach to a brand: its parking map record reads used by various cruise lines, while the record for Cruise Terminal 26 reads primarily used by Holland America Line and the one for Cruise Terminal 21 lists the line beside Balearia Caribbean and Princess Cruises, verified September 2026.

Broward County’s parking map gives Princess Cruises two buildings and Holland America Line two

The page carrying those assignments is not one of the eight terminal dossiers. It is the interactive parking map on porteverglades.net, reached from a Port Parking card in the Cruise section and from a button on the parking page that reads Find your terminal parking. Its own heading is Find Terminal Parking, and its instruction is to select a terminal to see information on parking and luggage drop off, and to check back the day of your cruise, as parking assignments may change.

Seven of the eight records name a line, read on 5 September 2026. The record for Cruise Terminal 2 reads primarily used by Princess Cruises, the one for Cruise Terminal 26 reads primarily used by Holland America Line, and the one for Cruise Terminal 21 reads primarily used by Balearia Caribbean, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line. Only Cruise Terminal 19 carries no brand at all, written as used by various cruise lines.

Two things follow that neither cruise line publishes. A second building goes to Princess Cruises, Cruise Terminal 21, which no page on princess.com mentions, and the same record seats it alongside Holland America Line and a ferry operator, Balearia Caribbean. Holland America Line, which names three halls, ends with county backing at two of them and none at the third.

The hedge is doing real work rather than covering vagueness. Disney Cruise Line publishes fourteen dated Disney Dream sailings that leave its own Cruise Terminal 4, twelve of them embarking or disembarking at Cruise Terminal 2 and two at Cruise Terminal 26, which are the two buildings the map gives to Princess Cruises and Holland America Line. Those dates are laid out in the fourteen Disney Dream sailings that do not use Cruise Terminal 4. The Disney record at Cruise Terminal 4 is the only one of the eight written without the word primarily.

Each record ends with a garage, and they match the pairing above: Cruise Terminal 2 parks in the Heron Garage, Cruise Terminals 19, 21 and 26 in the Palm Garage. Three of those four add the same bracketed instruction, to drop off passengers and luggage before entering the garage. Only the Cruise Terminal 21 record leaves it out, and the Cruise Terminal 2 record is one of two in the whole map that name a closest entrance, the SE 17th Street and Eisenhower gate.

Cruise Terminal 26 has the deepest berth Broward County publishes and half the check in desks of its two neighbors

Berth depth at Cruise Terminal 26 is 40 feet, matched among the six Port Everglades buildings with a published berth only by Cruise Terminal 29, and deeper than the 38 feet at both Cruise Terminal 19 and Cruise Terminal 21. Berth length runs the other way. Quay length at Cruise Terminal 21 reaches 1,475 feet, against 1,337 feet at Cruise Terminal 26 and 1,300 feet at Cruise Terminal 19.

The check in count is where the three stop resembling each other. Cruise Terminal 26 has 25 stations against 50 at each of the others, and yet its passenger waiting area is the largest of the three at 21,183 square feet, against 18,342 at Cruise Terminal 19 and 15,751 at Cruise Terminal 21. Dividing one by the other gives 847 square feet of waiting floor per check in station at Cruise Terminal 26, 367 at Cruise Terminal 19 and 315 at Cruise Terminal 21.

That ratio is worth carrying into the building. A hall with 2.7 times the seating room per desk of its neighbor is a hall where the queue is likely to be the constraint and the seat is not, so arriving at the assigned check in time matters more at Cruise Terminal 26 than at either of the other two. The rule is stated plainly on the county’s arriving and departing page: follow the cruise line’s assigned check in time, and to alleviate delays, do not arrive prior to assigned time.

Vertical circulation splits the same way. Four elevators and 4 escalators appear on the Cruise Terminal 26 and Cruise Terminal 21 pages, while the Cruise Terminal 19 page lists 2 and 2 for the same 50 desks the larger building has.

Princess Cruises still defers the pier twice on the page where the cruise is booked, and its own seaport has already answered

Princess Cruises answers the terminal question in two incompatible ways on princess.com. The Fort Lauderdale departure port page says you will be notified as to which pier your cruise from Fort Lauderdale will dock, then repeats further down that you will be notified of your specific pier assignment closer to your sail date. The word terminal never appears on it.

An undated guide on the same domain does the opposite. Under the heading asking where the Princess cruise terminal is, the page states that Princess ships are located at the following terminal, and gives Terminal 2 at 1801 SE 20th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL. That address is the exact street number Broward County prints on its own Cruise Terminal 2 page, down to the SE.

What the brand withholds, its own seaport has already published. The Broward County parking map reads primarily used by Princess Cruises at Cruise Terminal 2, and a second county trace agrees: over a 37 day window read on the public vessel traffic board on 4 September 2026, Regal Princess recorded 12 movements at berth 02 and Ruby Princess recorded 2, with no ship changing berth in the whole window. The board prints the operator as Princess Cruises, Inc. and the stevedore as Metro Cruise Services. Berth numbers at Port Everglades match terminal numbers, which is how Disney Cruise Line at berth 04 and Celebrity Cruises at berth 25 behave on the same board, and what that board carries for every ship is set out in the Broward County vessel traffic board and what it publishes before a sail date.

None of that overrides the booking page, and the reason sits on the county map itself. On the map the county writes primarily rather than exclusively, tells drivers to check back the day of the cruise because parking assignments may change, and berths at this seaport are not reserved for cruise ships. The best documented building in this guide is now Cruise Terminal 2, with the brand guide and three separate county traces behind it, and the dated boarding document is still the only instrument that names a berth for one sailing.

The Cruise Terminal 2 page names Carnival Corporation in prose and Princess Cruises only inside a photograph

Broward County describes Cruise Terminal 2 at 1801 SE 20th Street as an 85,504 square foot building whose amenities include Carnival Corporation’s Ocean Medallion service, a wearable technology that lets passengers connect to enhanced services before and after their cruise. Checked on 5 September 2026, that sentence has no counterpart on the pages for Cruise Terminals 4, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26 or 29.

One line on that same county page does name Princess Cruises, and not in prose. The single occurrence of the brand on the Broward County Cruise Terminal 2 page sits inside the alt text of a photograph, which reads that beautiful artwork is displayed behind the check-in counters at Cruise Terminal 2, which services Princess Cruises. Checked on 5 September 2026, no alt text names a cruise line on the Cruise Terminal 19, 21 or 26 pages. A sighted reader never meets that line and a screen reader reads it out, which makes it the quietest of the four traces pointing at Cruise Terminal 2.

That device is the one Princess Cruises publishes as its own. Its MedallionClass guide says all U.S. guests receive their free Medallion device either in the mail before leaving home or when they arrive at the terminal, that international guests pick theirs up at the port, and that the quarter sized device delivers faster boarding. So the county named a corporate parent and a wearable on the building whose street number Princess later printed, and kept the brand itself out of the prose.

A covered approach exists at only one of the four buildings in this guide. Broward County describes an air conditioned elevated passenger bridge with moving sidewalks connecting the Heron Parking Garage to Cruise Terminal 2, accessed from the 5th floor of the garage or from the elevators outside the terminal. No comparable bridge appears on the pages for Cruise Terminals 19, 21 or 26, where the walk from the Palm Parking Garage is outdoors.

The rest of the Cruise Terminal 2 dossier is modest beside the Holland America three. It lists 30 check in stations, 35,956 square feet of baggage laydown, a 20,720 square foot waiting area, 2 elevators and 3 escalators, and a berth of 1,602 feet by 31 feet, which is the longest quay and the shallowest water of the four buildings in this guide.

A Princess parking sentence charges $1 an hour and only one of the six filed steps costs that

The Princess guide that names Cruise Terminal 2 also prices the garage, and this is where it goes wrong. It says the first hour is generally priced at $4 and up to 5 hours at $8, after which additional hours are charged at $1 each up to the daily maximum. The first two figures matched Broward County exactly until the tariff was reissued on October 1, 2026, and now sit $1.00 and $2.00 low. The rule that follows does not exist in either version.

The port now publishes $5 for 0 to 1 hour and $10 for up to 5 hours on its parking rates page, then says only that fees for additional hours vary up to the daily maximum based on vehicle type. Item 1135 of Port Everglades Tariff No. 12, and since the October 1, 2026 reissue the main parking page as well, fill in what the rates page leaves out: $13.00 above 5 and up to 6 hours, $14.00 to 7 hours, $18.00 to 9 hours, $20.00 to 11 hours, $23.00 to 12 hours, and $25.00 from 12 hours on. Of those six steps exactly one, from six hours to seven, costs $1.00 more than the step below it.

Run the Princess rule out and the gap is measurable. Seven hours past the five hour mark at $1 each gives $15.00, while the filed tariff charges $23.00 at hour 12 and $25.00 from there on. The blog rule is $8.00 short at hour 12, and it does not reach the $25.00 maximum until hour 22, ten hours after the tariff does. The ceiling it prints, a maximum of $20 to $25, now matches only at its top end, and item 1135 adds the part no cruise line mentions: all parking fees include sales taxes. Every step of that ladder is laid out in the full Port Everglades parking tariff with tax inside it.

The Holland America page avoids the error by refusing to print a number. It names the Palm Parking Garage and sends the reader to porteverglades.net for current rates, which is why nothing on hollandamerica.com can go stale the way the Celebrity Cruises figure of $15 per day has.

Which of the four buildings a driver can trust, counted by how many issuers name it

Count the issuers behind each building and the ranking inverts. Four stand behind Cruise Terminal 2: the undated princess.com guide, the parking map sentence, the alt text on the county terminal page and 14 Princess movements at berth 02 on the county board. Two stand behind Cruise Terminal 26, the Holland America page and the map. Two stand behind Cruise Terminal 21 as well, with a complication, since the map adds Princess Cruises and Balearia Caribbean to it. One stands behind Cruise Terminal 19, and it is the cruise line’s own page.

So the building with the thinnest paper trail belongs to the brand that publishes most, and the building with the thickest belongs to the brand that publishes least. On advance planning from the brand’s own site Holland America Line still wins, and the criterion is how much of the drive can be settled at home: its page fixes three street numbers, a named garage, an airport gap of approximately 3 miles and 10 minutes, a taxi fare from $20 USD, a statement that there is no luggage storage at the pier, and a Broward County Transit stop in the Northport section of Port Everglades on SE 17th St. On documentation of the building itself, Princess Cruises wins at Cruise Terminal 2 without having published anything new.

The margin on the brand’s own pages is three buildings to one, and it comes with a defect the county exposes. Holland America Line opens that section by stating that there are three cruise terminals in Fort Lauderdale. Port Everglades has eight, numbered 2, 4, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26 and 29, so the sentence describes the line’s own rotation and not the seaport. Read as a rotation it is useful; read as a fact about Fort Lauderdale it is wrong by five buildings.

Princess Cruises wins on everything that is not the building. A passenger can have the Medallion mailed home, upload documents in advance, and reach the port by a mode the county lists without naming: Port Everglades says it is accessible by car, taxi, bus, train and ship, while Princess Cruises names Brightline outright and describes a partnership with it. The trade is narrower than it was. One brand tells you the door and leaves the rate to the county; the other keeps the door until the documents arrive and hands you everything else early, while the county now opens the door for both on the page that tells a driver where to park.

For a same day flight the two converge anyway. County guidance asks for at least 45 minutes between flight arrival and cruise check in time, and the spread between the brands on that same drive is a full mile, 1.8 miles from the county, about 2 from Princess Cruises and approximately 3 from Holland America Line. Which brand is right about the mileage does not change the 45 minutes.

Seven checks a Princess or Holland America passenger can finish before leaving home

• Measure the car against 7 feet. Both the Heron and the Palm garages carry a 7 foot clearance, and Broward County caps oversized parking at a maximum of 24 feet of length at $30.00 per entry under item 1135, $35 on the parking page, arranged by calling the parking management team on 954-468-3680.
• Bring identification for every adult in the car. Each of the three port entrances, at SE 17th St. by Eisenhower Blvd., at State Road 84 just east of U.S. 1 by Spangler Blvd., and at I-595 East on Eller Dr., runs a checkpoint where everyone 18 and older shows a government issued photo ID plus cruise documents, and vehicles are subject to search.
• Carry a card, not a booking. The port does not accept reservations or pre-payment for parking, and the daily rate begins when you pull the parking ticket from the machine, not when the ship boards.
• Check which taxi range your terminal page prints. Cruise Terminal 19 and Cruise Terminal 21 quote $80 to $159 to Miami International Airport while Cruise Terminal 26 quotes $80 to $150, so two of Holland America’s three buildings sit in one band and the third in another.
• Count the party before booking a van. Van on Demand serves parties of 3 or more at $11 per person to Fort Lauderdale, $25 to Miami and $45 to Palm Beach, and it is not available on all sailing days, so three passengers heading to the airport pay $33 against a metered taxi at $18 to $21.
• Open the Port Everglades parking map on the morning of the sailing. Its instruction is to check back the day of the cruise because parking assignments may change, and that map is the page pairing Cruise Terminal 2 with the Heron Garage and Cruise Terminals 19, 21 and 26 with the Palm Garage, verified September 2026.
• Plan the return for the morning, not the afternoon. Debarkation runs early, since the county states that passengers typically debark the ship between 7 and 9AM, and the parking facilities are not staffed 24 hours a day or on non cruise days.

Where a Princess or Holland America arrival at Port Everglades goes wrong

The costliest error is now reading primarily used by as an assignment. Six of the seven named records on the Broward County parking map carry that hedge, the map asks drivers to check back on the day because parking assignments may change, and Disney Cruise Line’s fourteen dated exceptions show what it covers: twelve of them put a Disney Dream sailing at Cruise Terminal 2, the building the map gives to Princess Cruises. A driver who parks at the Heron Parking Garage on the strength of that sentence and finds the ship on Eller Drive has crossed the port to the wrong side.

The second error is copying the Princess parking arithmetic into a budget. A $1 per hour rule that does not exist in the filed tariff underprices hour 12 by $8.00 and reaches the daily maximum ten hours late, and the same page misdescribes the port’s layout by calling Northport, Midport and Southport three main entry points. Those are port sections. The three entry points are the gated checkpoints on SE 17th St., State Road 84 and I-595 East.

A third trap belongs to Holland America passengers specifically. Its own count of three cruise terminals in Fort Lauderdale invites a driver to assume the port is small enough to guess at, and Cruise Terminal 21 is the one whose alternative transportation page the port’s own side menu does not link, even though that page loads normally and prints a different Miami taxi band from Cruise Terminal 26.

The last one is the address itself, and Broward County writes it two ways. A driver aiming at Cruise Terminal 21 is aiming at 2021 Eller Dr. in Hollywood under a Fort Lauderdale ZIP code of 33316. The county prints Cruise Terminal 26 at 2026 Eller Drive in Fort Lauderdale on its terminal page and in Hollywood on its parking map, both read on 5 September 2026, so the same county gives the same street number two towns, and a navigation app fed the city instead of the street number can send the same family to two different places for the same port. Royal Caribbean passengers meet a related version of this, described in what the Broward County berth log says when the cruise line will not.

Which pages behind these figures were read, and the one board that would not open

Every county number here comes from porteverglades.net pages read in September 2026 and again on October 7, 2026: the eight terminal dossiers, the interactive parking map, the parking and parking rates pages, getting here, arriving and departing, the cruise lines directory, and the alternative transportation pages for Cruise Terminals 2, 19, 21 and 26. The parking steps between $10 and $25 come from item 1135 of Port Everglades Tariff No. 12 as reissued on October 1, 2026, which the rates page summarizes as varying and the main parking page now prints. The eight records on the parking map are assembled in the browser by script, so they are readable in the page source and not in the rendered text, which is why searching the visible map for a cruise line returns nothing.

The cruise line figures come from the Fort Lauderdale port details page on hollandamerica.com and from three pages on princess.com, the Fort Lauderdale departure port page, the undated Fort Lauderdale port guide and the MedallionClass guide. Neither the vessel traffic board nor the cruise line pages were reachable in the same way: pevvesseltraffic.broward.org answered a scripted request in September with a challenge page and on 7 October 2026 with an empty script shell, never with rows, so the berth counts here are quoted from a browser reading dated 4 September 2026 and are a sample, not a published assignment. The county directory of ten cruise lines was confirmed on 5 September 2026 and again on 7 October 2026, and still carries three columns, cruise line, phone and website, with Holland America Line on 877-932-4259 and Princess Cruises on 800-774-6237, and no terminal anywhere in it. Which brands do put a number on their own pages is compared across all ten in the reconstruction of Port Everglades terminals by cruise line.

The figures in this guide were verified in September 2026 against the sources named in each section, and every figure credited to Broward County or Port Everglades was read again on October 7, 2026, twice and minutes apart, after Tariff No. 12 was reissued on October 1, 2026. Confirm a rate on the Port Everglades parking page or in item 1135 before driving in. Every October 1, the first day of its fiscal year, the county reissues its port tariff, while shuttle fares and cruise line transfer prices change by season, and ship schedules change weekly; check the issuer’s page before you travel. No provider paid for placement here, and none can pay to appear. Where a booking link earns Lot and Gate a commission it is marked as sponsored and flagged in this line, and as of September 2026 no affiliate link is live anywhere on this site.

The county answered the terminal question on a page about where to leave the car

One brand hands over three buildings and no price. The Princess pages hand over a price with a broken rule, a device in the mail and a building the booking page will not stand behind. Both leave the rate card to Broward County, and Broward County has the name on the door for seven of its eight buildings, filed under parking rather than under terminals.

Where it is filed is the practical finding here. The sentence naming Princess Cruises at Cruise Terminal 2 and Holland America Line at Cruise Terminal 26 sits on a map about where to leave the car, on the same website whose eight terminal dossiers name only Disney Cruise Line and Celebrity Cruises, and the one number every issuer still agrees on is $20.00, the taxi fare that satisfies all three published ranges, while the daily parking maximum it used to match rose to $25.00 on October 1, 2026.

Related guides

• Which cruise lines put a Port Everglades terminal number on their own pages
• Every step of the Port Everglades parking tariff with the sales tax inside
• The Royal Caribbean berths Broward County logs and never assigns
• How Broward County measures each of the eight numbered Port Everglades terminals