Rome and Silversea Day 12

Disembarkation in Lisbon and the flight home

Posted by brian on May 15, 2026 · 7 mins read
  • Start of day: Lisbon, Portugal (disembarkation)
  • End of day: Home

The cruise ended in Lisbon this morning. I opted to carry my luggage off the ship on my own, so disembarkation was a breeze. As I walked through the cruise terminal by myself with my bag, multiple staff members were concerned, in a “no no no, you can’t be here!” way, that I was expecting to pick up a bag and that they weren’t ready yet.

I grabbed a taxi from the taxi stand and am pretty sure I was overcharged a bit, but I wasn’t concerned enough to haggle. I arrived at the Lisbon airport around 8:15am.

A blue hardshell suitcase and a black backpack resting at the open-air curbside of Lisbon airport beneath a large steel lattice canopy, with a paper coffee cup and a croissant on a small table in the foreground and a green Heineken sign in the distance

The earliest Delta would let me check my bag was 9am according to the sign: (note the Boston flight at 12:45pm)

A large overhead departures board in Terminal 2 of Lisbon's Humberto Delgado Airport, listing morning flights with green 'Check-in Open' status to destinations including Boston, Brussels, Newark, Paris, San Francisco, Washington Dulles, Madrid, Madeira, Chicago O'Hare, Ponta Delgada, Frankfurt, Manchester, Milan Malpensa, Oslo, Rome Fiumicino, Geneva, and Stuttgart, with Portuguese baggage instructions printed down the right side

Reflecting on it now, I’m pretty sure they would’ve let me check my bag earlier given the chaos that came next. For future Delta travelers in Lisbon, you’re probably looking for the “D” area:

The nearly empty check-in hall at Lisbon Airport with rows of counters numbered 65 to 70 beneath a blue wall reading 'Cuidamos, para que tudo corra bem,' a green pillar marked with the letter D, and a red Delta Sky Priority banner, a few travelers scattered across the polished floor

The Delta agent was very direct with me, making eye contact and saying she strongly suggested I head directly to security and onward to passport control without stopping. You also pass this sign right after checking in with Delta:

A Delta 'IMPORTANT NOTICE' sign mounted on a stanchion reading 'PLEASE After Security, GO STRAIGHT to PASSPORT CONTROL — LONG QUEUES DURING PEAK TIMES — DON'T MISS YOUR FLIGHT,' beside a red Delta Sky Priority banner and metal queue railings, with travelers walking through the bright glass-roofed terminal behind it

Security itself only took about 12 minutes1. After security they funnel you through a big duty-free store; do not dally here. I joined the passport control line at 9:15am. From there it was 55 minutes to the “All Passports” gate, then another 25 minutes to reach the EES2 enrollment kiosk. Enrollment worked3 and the machine told me to head for the e-gates, except that those appeared to have stopped working just a few minutes earlier. So instead it was another 17 minutes to reach a human officer.

A long line of travelers waiting along a glass-walled corridor at Lisbon airport, seen looking forward from within the queue, with overhead lighting and daylight coming through the windows

A busy airport shopping concourse at Lisbon airport crowded with travelers, an fnac store and duty-free shops lining the walkway, a tall dark decorative column under a curved white ceiling, and departure boards visible in the distance

Total border-control time with my USA passport: 1 hour, 37 minutes. Worth noting: this whole ordeal is for leaving the Schengen zone, not entering it. The USA doesn’t do passport controls when leaving the country, so newer travelers might not know to budget time for this when traveling elsewhere.

The long lines leave little to no time for shopping.

The brightly lit storefront of 'The Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine' at Lisbon airport, with a colorful carnival-style mural of a ferris wheel and a stylized sardine, shelves of decorative canned-sardine tins, and a shopper walking past on the red carpet out front

My flight to Boston started boarding around 20 minutes after I made it to the gate area. We pushed back a few minutes late, waiting on a few passengers. The flight felt long. It was uneventful.

Boston was gray and cold-ish (53℉).

The view from an airplane window of a blue-and-silver Delta jet engine on a wet runway at Boston Logan, looking out over a gray, rainy harbor toward a low coastal residential shoreline in the distance

Customs and immigration in Boston were a breeze thanks to Global Entry, though if I recall correctly it was almost a mile (!!) of walking to get there. The connection in Boston was tighter than I would’ve preferred. Had my Boston-to-RDU flight not been delayed some, it would’ve started boarding just as I walked up. That flight was also uneventful, as was collecting my luggage, grabbing an Uber, and making it home.

– End of trip –

Footnotes:

  1. My theory is that people make it through security pretty quickly, think to themselves, “all that fear-mongering about Lisbon airport, and I made it through in 12 minutes,” hit the lounge, and then realize (too late?) they’re still on the wrong side of passport control. ↩

  2. The EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) records non-EU travelers’ biometrics each time they cross an external Schengen border, on both entry and exit. ↩

  3. Recall that it failed immediately when I tried in Rome 12 days earlier. So at least I’m in the system now, though it’s unclear whether that will make future Schengen travel any faster for me. ↩

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