The Mediterranean ports where small-ship access is a checkable fact, not a marketing line

This is a physical constraint, not a policy Portofino could relax

Other tender ports on this page involve a choice, a rule, or a size threshold that could in principle change. Portofino's can't: the harbour is too small and shallow for cruise-ship infrastructure, full stop, and a bigger harbour isn't being built. That's also why the Genoa substitution rate is as high as it is: on a day when tendering would be genuinely unsafe or uncomfortable, there is no fallback berth to use instead, only a different port entirely.

The cruise line doesn't control this transfer, Capri does

Nearly every other tender port on this page uses the calling ship's own tender fleet. Capri is the exception, and it's a local-control decision rather than an infrastructure limit: Marina Grande's own rules keep a visiting ship's tenders out and require Capri's resident motorboats instead, shared with the island's regular ferry and hydrofoil traffic from Naples and Sorrento. It's a small operational detail almost no port guide states plainly, and it changes what the transfer itself actually feels like.

The size rule was never the real story, port allocation was

The original, widely repeated version of this port's story is clean: smaller ships dock at the Riva, larger ones anchor and tender. Checking which small luxury lines actually call there found the same ships, Silversea, Seabourn and Windstar, described as both docking and tendering, depending which account you read, which is the tell that ship size alone can't be the deciding factor. A direct line check resolved it: cruise-trade discussion of exactly this question at Hvar states plainly that whether a call docks or tenders depends on which other ships are in port the same day, with the port authority making the final call on berth allocation, and which line is prepared to pay more in fees reportedly playing a part too. It's the same mechanism this page already found at Kotor, a genuine day-to-day allocation question, not a fixed characteristic of either the port or the ship.

This is the one port on this page where being the smaller ship doesn't guarantee the better outcome

Hvar, on this same page, turns out to work the identical way once checked directly, day-to-day berth allocation rather than a size rule, and Flåm/Olden on the Norway page at least have a plausible "smaller is better" logic behind their uncertainty. Kotor doesn't even have that: ships up to roughly Panamax size can take the main pier directly, and it's berth availability on the day, not primarily ship size, that decides who tenders when several ships call at once. A guest on a small luxury ship shouldn't assume Kotor is an automatic dock, and a guest on a larger mainstream ship shouldn't assume the opposite either.

The access type and the guest experience aren't the same question

Portofino and Korčula are both true, permanent tender ports with no cruise-scale dock, but they read completely differently in practice. Portofino's tender can be cancelled outright by weather, with a real chance of ending up in Genoa instead. Korčula's tender pier sits directly at the Old Town's walls, a two-minute crossing with nothing else on this page beating it for convenience. "Tender port" alone tells a guest almost nothing about which of these two experiences they're actually going to have.