The Night Before, Ranked

Your three best hotels, live

Change any answer and the picks change with it. They’re built from the same published facts as the ranking below. Nobody pays to be here.

Your night before, worked out

Five answers, and the page builds the whole thing: the hotel, the ride in, the ride to the ship, what happens to the car, what time to leave, and how you get home. Every figure is one the hotel, the port or the company publishes. Where nobody publishes a number, you’ll see that instead of a guess.

Partner links (transfers, rental cars, luggage storage) may earn Seabound Journeys a commission at no extra cost to you. They don't change the plan, which is built only from what each company publishes.

The top three

No hotel we checked runs a shuttle to MPCT or prints a rate to leave your car, so the podium is distance and the evening. Golden Tulip Euromed leads on 36, a Joliette hotel with a pool and a restaurant. NH Collection scores 33 and Novotel Suites Euromed ties it on 33, both in Joliette too, about 4.3 and 3.9 road miles from MPCT by our routing.

The twenty, in order

Narrow the twenty by what your night needs. Save the ones you like. Tick up to three to compare side by side — the order is ours, the shortlist is yours.

We checked 24 hotels in Joliette, around the Vieux-Port, by Saint-Charles and at the airport. Twenty-one were open and published enough to score, and the twenty highest are here. Where the hotel’s own site wasn’t read, its page says whose listing we used — the tourist office’s, the Michelin Guide’s or the airport’s.

From the airport to the hotel, then on to the ship

Pick how you’re arriving. The board counts what each hotel publishes, the table lights up that column, and the companies below run from the airport to the port.

Three airport hotels in our twenty publish a free shuttle from the terminals; none of the twenty runs one to the ship.

How far each pick sits from the ship

Every distance here ends at MPCT’s Porte 4, at the GPS point the port authority publishes for it. They’re road miles by our routing, not straight lines, and they assume empty roads. Joliette is about 3.8 to 4.3 miles. The Vieux-Port’s north side, Belsunce and Saint-Charles are about 4.5 to 5 miles, the south quay and the Pharo about 5.5 to 5.6 miles, and the airport hotels about 9.2 to 11.6 miles.

Four of the twenty are in Joliette, ten around the Vieux-Port and the station, three on the south quay and three at the airport. Terminal J4 is the other way: it sits by the Mucem, so the old-port hotels are the close ones for it — Hôtel du Mucem is about 0.4 road miles from J4 by our routing.

The Night-Before Score, out of 100

Five things make a Marseille night before easy or hard. We score each one from what the hotel publishes, or, where we couldn’t read its own site, from the tourist office’s, the Michelin Guide’s or the airport’s listing — and each page names which.

If nobody says it, it scores zero there. A distance to the Joliette ferry port isn’t a distance to MPCT, so it doesn’t count as a walk, and an airport shuttle isn’t a ride to the ship.

Where the car goes while you sail

None of the twenty sells a way to leave the car while you sail, on any page we read. The certain option is the port’s own lot.

Every option side by side: Marseille cruise parking, compared.

What we checked and left out

We checked 24 hotels. Each one that missed the twenty is below, with the reason. Le Petit Nice, Les Bords de Mer, the C2 Hotel, Les Roches Blanches in Cassis and Villa Gallici in Aix are on the splurge list, with two of these twenty: the InterContinental and the Sofitel.

Landing the day before?

Pre-cruise hotel FAQ