Getting There & Parking at Port of San Francisco

The Port of San Francisco does not hedge this. Its cruise page states that temporary or overnight parking is not provided at the cruise terminals, in those words, and then names its alternative: Metropolis offers cruise parking at 55 Francisco Street and 80 Francisco Street, and you should book directly with them. The Port adds two cautions in the same breath — confirm the reservation with the parking company before your trip, and understand that the Port provides the information as a courtesy and does not manage the lot. Treat that as the Port telling you it will not fix a parking problem for you.

This is the one that will actually strand somebody. There is a real 125-space surface lot on Pier 27, operated by Impark as Lot #81, and it appears in map applications as parking at the cruise terminal. Its own listing says that if a cruise ship is docked, no parking is allowed, and that on a day before an arrival all vehicles must leave the pier by 6:00pm. So the lot is genuinely there, genuinely close, and unavailable on precisely the mornings a cruise passenger would drive to it. Its published rates — $30 flat on weekdays, $35 at weekends, $50 oversized — are for the days no ship is alongside. One further sign of how stale this corner of the internet is: Impark's own listing redirects cruise parking to "Lot 55 (80 Francisco)", a site that is now run by Metropolis and no longer appears in Impark's own inventory.

San Francisco has two working cruise terminals, and the parking decision is the same at both while the walk is not. The Port's own Tariff No. 5 sets out the relationship in one sentence: Pier 27 is the primary passenger cruise ship terminal at the Port of San Francisco, however the Port may elect to offer an alternative berth. In practice that alternative is Pier 35, about a 6-8 minute walk north by the Port's own measure, and the split is consistent enough to plan around — across the Port's published 2026 and 2027 schedules, 78 of the 89 vessel calls each year work Pier 27 and 11 work Pier 35. No cruise line is exclusive to either pier, so the line you booked tells you nothing; the berth is named in your booking documents. The practical differences are small but real. The Francisco Street garages are marginally closer to Pier 35 than to Pier 27. The nearest streetcar stop changes: The Embarcadero and Sansome Street for Pier 27, one stop further north at Bay Street for Pier 35. And the Port publishes a drop-off instruction for Pier 27 only — the line about taxis and vehicles dropping cruise passengers at the terminal hall entrance sits inside its Pier 27 paragraph, and there is no equivalent sentence for Pier 35, so confirm that arrangement with your cruise line rather than assuming the two piers work identically. One thing to disregard: the Port's cruise page is headed for Piers 27, 35 and 30/32 and gives walking directions to Piers 30/32, but neither published schedule assigns a single cruise call there.

Metropolis publishes a drive-up rate at 80 Francisco Street of $4.00 per 30 minutes with a maximum charge for the day of $21.60. Multiply that out and a week looks like $151.20, which would make San Francisco one of the cheapest ports on this site. It is not a price you can use. The garage's published hours are 7:00am to 7:00pm, seven days a week, and the operator's own lot record sets overnight parking to disallowed, with an alert that reads: overnight parking is not allowed, unless you are a participant of the cruise. In other words the cheap daily rate and the ability to leave a car overnight are mutually exclusive here, and the dated cruise product is the only compliant route.

The two garages the Port names do not have the same clearance. 80 Francisco Street posts 6 feet 5 inches; 55 Francisco Street posts 7 feet. That rules out most roof boxes, raised trucks and taller vans at one of them and not the other, and the Port names both addresses equally without saying which you will be assigned to. If you drive anything tall, settle the address with Metropolis before you set off rather than discovering the bar on sail morning. Metropolis's own cruise landing page names only 80 Francisco Street, which is the lower of the two.

Because the cruise product is flat-priced rather than per-day, the shorter your cruise the worse parking looks. A couple flying into San Francisco International pays $11.80 each to reach Embarcadero on BART, and the F Market streetcar to the terminal door is covered by the transfer discount if they tap a Clipper or contactless card. Two people therefore reach Pier 27 from the airport for less than $24 all in. Against a flat per-sailing parking charge, driving only makes sense when you are coming from outside the Bay Area, when there are enough of you to split the cost, or when your luggage genuinely will not travel on a train. Two service gaps are worth planning around: BART's first train out of the airport on a Sunday is 8:08am, and the F line's published timetable starts at 6:00am even though its route page headline says seven.

No hotel near the terminals publishes a cruise parking package, and no operator near the piers publishes a shuttle. What does exist sits by the airport, written for airline passengers rather than cruise passengers, and works because both hotels are within reach of Millbrae BART. Crowne Plaza San Francisco Airport publishes an Airport Park and Fly Package covering one night plus complimentary parking for up to seven days, with additional days at $10; its ordinary guest parking is $2.00 an hour or $24.00 a day. The Dylan Hotel at SFO publishes a Park, Stay & Fly Package covering one car for up to ten days at $11 per additional day, and adds a $25 transportation credit applied at checkout, dated on its own page until 12/31/2026. Match the allowance to your itinerary before booking either: a seven-night Alaska round trip fits inside Crowne Plaza's window and a ten-day Mexican Riviera does not, while The Dylan's ten-day allowance is the most generous published window we found for a San Francisco sailing. Neither shuttle serves Pier 27 — Crowne Plaza's runs to the airport and BART, and The Dylan describes SamTrans service from 8:00 AM to midnight, and from 10:00 AM on Sundays — so plan the leg to the terminal separately, and check those hours against your boarding window if you sail early. Aggregators sell park-and-cruise bundles at several downtown hotels, but those are third-party products rather than terms the hotels publish themselves, and they are not recorded here.

Both Bay Area airports have their own BART station, which is what makes leaving the car a real option rather than a lecture. From San Francisco International a Yellow or Red line train runs to Embarcadero with no change in 31 to 32 minutes for $11.80 one way. From Oakland the fare is $13.45, one tap covering both the airport connector and the train, with a cross-platform change at Coliseum and a total of 36 to 37 minutes. Neither station is at the ship: the Port measures Embarcadero at about a 20 minute walk from Pier 27, so most people finish on the F Market streetcar, which stops at The Embarcadero and Sansome Street across the road from the terminal, or one stop further at Bay Street for Pier 35. That leg is $2.85 on Clipper or a contactless card and $3.00 in cash, and because BART and SFMTA both publish a transfer discount of up to $2.85 within two hours, tapping rather than paying cash makes the streetcar free in practice. Two people therefore reach Pier 27 from San Francisco International for under $24, or from Oakland for under $27. One rule is worth knowing before you tap: BART requires every rider aged five and over to carry their own card or device and to enter and exit with the same one, and a mismatch charges a $7.55 penalty fare. Set that against a parking charge that does not shrink for a short cruise and the case for driving rests on distance, group size and luggage rather than on price. If you do need a car at the door, SFO's own taxi sheet gives approximate fares of $57 downtown and $66 to Fisherman's Wharf, with Pier 27 between them, plus a $6.00 exit surcharge on rides originating at the airport, and notes that up to five people can share one fare.

San Francisco has an unusual amount of out-of-date parking information in circulation, and two examples are worth naming because they sit on pages that still load. Princess's own San Francisco embarkation PDF quotes Impark at $18 a day; the file's own last-modified header is dated 2017. And at least one cruise-booking site prints $12 to $14 per calendar day, cash only, for 55 Francisco Street. Neither figure matches anything either operator published when we read their pages on 2026-08-17. This is exactly why the Port tells passengers to confirm with the parking company before traveling, and it is the right instruction.

Two things a driver or a passenger with reduced mobility would reasonably expect to find are simply not published, and it is more useful to say so than to fill the space. The first is accessibility at the terminals. The Port's cruise page named no accessible drop-off, no wheelchair provision and no assistance arrangement when we read it on 2026-08-17, and its dedicated accessibility page is scoped to the Port's website, its public meetings and its offices at Pier 1 rather than to boarding a ship. The one passenger-relevant line it does carry is that the Embarcadero and nearby streets have metered parking, and that vehicles with disabled plates or placards may use metered spaces free under state rules. For anything beyond that, your cruise line's special-services desk is the authority, not the Port. The second gap is porters and screening. The Port describes neither, and the only published account of the check-in flow at Pier 27 sits in a Princess embarkation PDF whose own server date is 2017 and whose parking section is provably wrong today, so we do not repeat its description of the queue as current. Expect the ordinary pattern — bags to a porter at the curb, then a check-in desk inside — and follow the instructions your own line sends, which are the only account written for your sailing and the only place to settle what you must carry to board.