GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

This year’s cruise sea­son is ex­pect­ed to rake in $56 mil­lion, Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell told the Busi­ness Guardian on Tues­day.

“In the first full cruise sea­son since the pan­dem­ic, No­vem­ber 2022 to April 2023 we re­ceived 68 cruise calls across Port-of-Spain, Scar­bor­ough and Char­lot­teville.

“Those 68 cruise calls brought 96,000 pas­sen­gers with a dis­em­barka­tion rate of 80 per cent or four in every five pas­sen­gers. Our sur­veys re­vealed that each dis­em­bark­ing pas­sen­ger spent US$50 on av­er­age, there­fore, ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$4 mil­lion or TT$25 mil­lion was spent spent in the econ­o­my over this sea­son,” Mitchell said.

He not­ed that with this cruise sea­son, from No­vem­ber 2023 to April 2024, there is an an­tic­i­pat­ed to be a 51 per cent in­crease in the num­ber of calls across the three ports of T&T.

“We have se­cured 113 cruise calls and an­tic­i­pate 212,000 thou­sand pas­sen­gers and 81,000 crew mem­bers.

“Us­ing the same dis­em­barka­tion rate and av­er­age pas­sen­ger spend, we should ex­pect to re­ceive at least US$8 mil­lion or $56 mil­lion. Of course, we will try to in­crease the rate of vis­i­tor spend by im­prov­ing and in­creas­ing our of­fer­ings,” the min­is­ter said.

Not­ing that the cruise in­dus­try has al­ways been an im­por­tant sub­sec­tor for this coun­try’s tourism sec­tor, Mitchell added that it not on­ly brings in a con­sid­er­able num­ber of pas­sen­gers per cruise call, but al­so pro­vides tremen­dous earn­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for tour op­er­a­tors, craft and trade and oth­er cul­tur­al work­ers.

On Tues­day, Tourism Trinidad cut the rib­bon for the of­fi­cial launch of the 2023 to 2024 cruise sea­son. The event was marked by the wel­come of the Ru­by Princess, the sec­ond ship of the sea­son, from the renowned Princess Cruis­es line.

Mitchell al­so spoke about what mea­sures he would like so see im­ple­ment­ed to en­hance this coun­try’s cruise sea­son.

“This cruise sea­son, the Min­istry of Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts and its agen­cies in­clud­ing Tourism Trinidad, Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA), Queens Hall, and the Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion (NCC) will con­tin­ue to col­lab­o­rate with the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice, the tourism stake­hold­ers, and the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion and sim­i­lar­ly, the THA and its agen­cies and stake­hold­ers in To­ba­go, to en­sure we con­tin­ue to pro­vide a vi­able cruise tourism prod­uct for our vis­i­tors.

“Among the mea­sures, we ex­pect con­tin­ued pri­or­i­ty over the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of our vis­i­tors, smooth op­er­a­tions at our cruise ter­mi­nal at the port of Port-of-Spain, and this year, we have col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Port of Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion who are host­ing a vis­i­tors’ mar­ket at the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade which will boast lo­cal­ly made craft (one of the ways we ex­pect to im­prove spend), to­geth­er with live en­ter­tain­ment pro­vid­ed by the min­istry,” Mitchell de­tailed.

More­so, cruise agent and CEO at Car­val­ho’s Agen­cies, Charles Car­val­ho, rec­om­mend­ed that the port of the Port-of-Spain needs to be widened to ac­com­mo­dat­ed larg­er ships which are grow­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty among pas­sen­gers.

The agency is the port agent for cruise ships com­ing to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Ac­cord­ing to Car­val­ho, while Trinidad can ac­com­mo­date ships at the port, that ca­pac­i­ty needs to im­prove es­pe­cial­ly as ves­sels be­come more mod­ern.

“We have maxed out in terms of the size of the ships we can han­dle right now in Trinidad. We can han­dle up to a 330-me­tre length ves­sel, but to­day we have ves­sels up­wards of that such as 400 me­tres,” he ex­plained.

Re­gard­ing oth­er fac­tors to be tack­led, Car­val­ho ad­vised there be greater in­cen­tives for cruise lin­ers to come to T&T, not­ing that Trinidad is the fur­thest is­land south in the Caribbean, which makes that dis­tance some­what oner­ous for ves­sels to trav­el.

“The dis­tance to come here out of the Unit­ed States is a chal­lenge...The ships that come to the south­ern Caribbean, they would come up to Bar­ba­dos or St Lu­cia.

“So cruise lines look for in­cen­tives to cut costs in terms of fu­el burn, you can look at re­duc­ing head tax, port fees etc be­cause every dol­lar saved by a cruise line is like a mil­lion dol­lars,” Car­val­ho said, as he ad­vised that these are the is­sues the au­thor­i­ties need to look at in tak­ing the cruise in­dus­try for­ward.

POS as a home port

How­ev­er, Car­val­ho con­tin­ues to be a stal­wart in putting Trinidad on the in­ter­na­tion­al map as he wants to es­tab­lish this coun­try as a home port for cruis­es.

The is­sue of a home port was part of re­cent dis­cus­sions at a cruise con­fer­ence held in Mex­i­co, which Car­val­ho took part in.

“We are look­ing at an 80 to 90 per cent chance that we could make Port-of-Spain a home port for Roy­al Caribbean’s fu­ture calls...for pas­sen­gers fly­ing in­to Trinidad to board the ship sim­i­lar to that fa­cil­i­ty Mi­a­mi and Bar­ba­dos.

“We are look­ing at cre­at­ing new itin­er­aries and bring­ing the ship fur­ther south,” Car­val­ho said.

On how soon such a home port can es­tab­lished, he said the cruise lines book their itin­er­aries two to three years in ad­vance.

“But once they have this in­for­ma­tion, they can put things in ad­vance. So if there is a need for it and they see that they can put you in be­fore the two to three years re­gard­ing the itin­er­aries and plan­ning. There could be a pos­si­bil­i­ty that things can change overnight. They may have an is­sue with an­oth­er port or if they may want to make a change, that in­for­ma­tion can help them pre­pare for the fu­ture and the fu­ture could be im­me­di­ate,” he ex­plained.

He not­ed that Trinidad al­so has all the lo­gis­tics in place which in­clude air­lift.

“What makes the home port fea­si­ble is the in­ter­na­tion­al flights that come to your des­ti­na­tion and come at reg­u­lar in­ter­vals. Some peo­ple could have good air­lift in­to the coun­try, we could ac­com­mo­date the air­craf and we have a large air­port so we would han­dle flights com­ing in and spe­cial char­ters and we have ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion,” Car­val­ho said.

This cruise sea­son is ex­pect­ed to ex­pe­ri­ence of ten in­au­gur­al vis­its and five new cruise lines, in­clud­ing Seabourn, Ex Po­laris, Vic­to­ria Cruis­es, Sil­ver Seas Cruis­es, and Salen Ship Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny.

The ma­jor­i­ty of the pas­sen­gers are ex­pect­ed to orig­i­nate from the Unit­ed States, fol­lowed by the UK and Cana­da.

For the Ru­by Princess, which sailed in­to Port-of-Spain on Tues­day, just over 800 of the pas­sen­gers went on pre-booked tours util­is­ing 50 maxi-taxis from lo­cal tour op­er­a­tors, ac­cord­ing to Tourism Trinidad.

It al­so not­ed that vis­it­ing pas­sen­gers took ad­van­tage of an ar­ray of tours, al­low­ing them to ex­plore the cul­ture and nat­ur­al beau­ty of Trinidad.

Some of the tours in­clud­ed a city tour, Mara­cas beach and wa­ter­fall tour, Ca­roni swamp tour, Paramin tour, and a vis­it to the fa­mous An­gos­tu­ra Rum Dis­tillery.