Cruise tourism takes Barcelona back
Spanish ports recover 75% of this type of travelers compared to 2019. By 2023, the great landing of North Americans is expected. The year begins with trips around the world.
Cruises MSC Magnifica and MSC Poesia left the Port of Barcelona last weekend to begin two round-the-world tours of about four months. In both expeditions, 591 Spaniards have embarked, four times more than in the last edition.n, as explained by the third largest cruise company in the world.
Applauded by some, for the business and employment it generates, and reviled by others, considering that contributing to mass tourism, this example shows that the cruise tourism It looks at the splendor that I lived in 2019 in Spain. The pandemic forces the cancellation of the activity and in 2021 it will resume gradually. Now with fewer restrictions, 2022 has been a year of transition before 2023, which is expected to see full recovery.
Spanish ports added 7.46 million cruise passengers in 2022 (data up to November), 74.5% of the figure for the same period in 2019. Barcelona is consolidated as the main portwith 2.2 million tourists in the first eleven months of the year, 72% of the pre-Covid figure, the year before the pandemic, which is taken as a reference and also set the historical record.
Palma and Las Palmas
Barcelona is followed by the ports of the Balearic Islands, with 1.67 million tourists (36% less than in 2019); Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, with 778,118 (-37%) and Valencia, which has already exceeded the pre-Covid record by 40%, with 598,358 Travellers.
If you look at the number of scales It could be concluded that the shipping companies have opted for a normal year, with 4,216 operations between January and November in Spain, 6% more than in 2019.
The companies have decided to put on the market more or less the same offer as before the pandemic, but the demand has not responded in the same way. An explanation could be sought in the North American market, which opened its borders at the end of 2021.
book in advance
In the sector they explain that tourists from that region book a year in advance, so it is expected that in 2023 a public that represents approximately one fifth of the visitors will be able to return en masse. cruise passengers of ports such as Barcelona.
For example, last October, Royal’s vice president for Europe, Bert Hernández, predicted that in 2023 there will be “record number of US cruise passengers in Europe”. “In 2022 we have seen that North Americans stay in the Caribbean, while Europeans choose trips to their continent; North Americans know that going to Europe now is cheap and traveling en masse”, he advanced. Its competitor MSC has reported that in 2022 it has “broken the all-time sales record”. The prospects seem positive in Spain, where the incidence of Chinese tourism is almost nil in this segment.
For this exercise, the Barcelona Port Authority (APB) calculates that some 800 ships will once again pass through its facilities, the same number as before the pandemic, with MSC, Royal and Caribbean Coast like the leaders. The challenge will now be for the boats to fill up again as in 2019, something very likely.
Open debate in Barcelona
The improvement of the cruise sector in the city occurs when the Barcelona City Council has reopened the debate on the industry, despite the fact that the APB is complying with the agreement it reached with the mayoress herself, Ada Colau, in 2018, consisting of limit the number of terminals to seven and concentrate them all in the Adosado Dock. To raise the last of all of them, a tender has been put out to which for now they opt Real Caribe and a group made up of Norwegian Cruise, Viking and Virgin.
The sector, which in 2018 generated a impact of about 1,080 million in the city, seeks to increase the number of tourists who start or finish the tour in Barcelona, to avoid the crowds that are produced by tourists who climb for a few hours. If in 2017 46.9% of the cruise passengers who arrived in the Catalan capital were transit, in 2022 it was 43.1%.