Independence of the Seas - Bermuda

Bermuda from Bayonne is a sea-day sandwich: one day out, two calendar days alongside at the Royal Naval Dockyard, one day back, with the call on the far western tip and the rest of the island a ferry or bus away. How much of Bermuda fits depends on the hours rather than the day count. A 2022 route thread comparing five- and seven-night Bermuda options from the New York ports made that the deciding question: one reply put the five-night sailings at closer to 24 hours in port and called the trip a lot of travel and money if Bermuda itself is the goal, another said the extra day is always better, and a third called Bermuda a relaxing port with not much beyond a day unless beach time or paid excursions fill it. The same thread flagged the calendar - a late-October call means highs in the 60s and low 70s, and April through September is the window people recommend. Hurricane season is the other structural fact: a 2025 thread about a storm bearing down on a Liberty of the Seas Bermuda run got the standard answers, that the captain reroutes rather than sails into weather, that only port fees come back, and that one poster's friends ended up in Canada instead of Bermuda.

On Independence itself, the only sailing-specific thread is a December 2025 question from a parent taking two 13-year-olds on this five-night run and wondering whether The Key was worth it. The most-upvoted reply said no and took the perks apart one by one: get to the terminal early instead of paying for priority boarding, book a Chops lunch for less than the embarkation-day meal, show up 30 minutes early for the theatre, and note that priority tendering is meaningless here because the Dockyard is a pier. Another reply said no specifically for Freedom-class ships; the one dissenter buys it only when it prices within about $50 of a single-device Wi-Fi plan. The comparison is stark: Liberty of the Seas, the same class of ship, runs the same five nights from the same terminal a couple of hundred dollars cheaper per person and is the cheapest way to do this route in the catalog, while Independence's own seven-night Western Caribbean sailing is priced below this five-night one. Norwegian Breakaway's seven-night Bermuda sailings and Norwegian Pearl's from Philadelphia cost about the same as this and are the shape route posters recommended for a Bermuda-first trip. That leaves this sailing for people who want a big Royal Caribbean ship on a short school-break run from New Jersey without flying, and not for anyone whose main object is Bermuda, who is better served by a seven-night with a second full day at the Dockyard.