The cruise ship sector in Spain expects to lose practically all annual turnover, just over 4,000 million euros, given that 2020 will be practically blank, with hardly any activity in January and February, the weakest months of the year. In statements to Efe, the director in Spain of the International Cruise Lines Association (CLIA), Alfredo Serrano, has said that he is confident that traffic will be restored by the end of the year and that the client will recover the confidence that it is a safe trip and a good vacation experience.
The data handled by CLIA indicate that in 2018, the latest data available, the sector billed in Spain 4,300 million euros, which this year will remain in a very residual amount because the activity has been practically limited to the first two months of the year in the Canary Islands. Already in April CLIA advanced that the industry would lose 985 million if it did not operate until June. Today these forecasts have been greatly exceeded by a dramatic reality, which will make the sector barely compute income at the end of the year.
The full recovery of activity will not take place until well into 2021: most companies try to reactivate travel little by little and observe a certain dynamism in reservations by the end of this year, but, above all, for the summer of next year. For Serrano, summer “is lost” because it is not yet allowed to operate in Spain and companies need a minimum of a month to start, but given that air traffic is already open, he believes that it must be “imminent” for cruises to be allowed .
In Europe some countries are beginning, albeit in a very marginal way, to grease their sailing machinery, initially in the Mediterranean. Ships are already starting to leave in Germany, for the moment only to sail nonstop to roll their new health security protocols, although routes to the Baltic countries will shortly be opened, explains the director of CLIA. Norway is in a similar process and Italy, Greece and Portugal are in very advanced stages of developing their local regulations, so that by the end of the month they will be ready to sail.
Serrano affirms that, above what the authorities have established, the companies were already working before the stoppage of operations to integrate all the measures and minimize the risk of contagions and, if they occurred, eliminate the risks of spread on board. CLIA maintains that interest in this form of travel remains high: according to their data, 87% of those who had previously traveled on this type of ship will repeat the experience and point out that “people who cruise know that they are going much more there in sanitary aspects ».
The cruise industry plays a prominent role in the world economy: it directly employs 1.17 million people and has a turnover of 150,000 million dollars annually (131,100 million euros). The year 2019 closed with an estimated 30 million passengers and by 2020 CLIA expected it to rise to 32 million, but the pandemic will leave the numbers far from the target and will break a nine-year streak of continuous growth, at rates above 5%. Data from State Ports in Spain indicate that in 2019 there were more than 10 million people who arrived at one of these ports.
However, the world and Spanish figures are not comparable because the count of State Ports includes all movements, so that, as an example, if a cruise passenger embarks in Barcelona, he disembarks there and makes a stop in Palma de Mallorca is logged three times.
In Spain, which ranks second in Europe in number of cruise passengers received after Italy, the sector generates 4,500 million euros annually and employs 33,400 people (including direct, indirect and induced jobs). In addition, Spain registered in 2018, the latest data available to the association, 530,000 cruise passengers, which places it as the fourth issuing country in Europe behind Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy. The world market is very “complicated”, especially in the United States, and especially in Florida, where the three most important cruise ports in the world are (Miami, Cape Canaveral and Fort Lauderdale).
The global cruise industry is generally less seasonal and is looking for good weather, “follow the sun.” In the summer of the northern hemisphere, there is a high concentration of cruises in Europe, taking advantage of the fact that it is an attractive continent for Europeans and Americans, and when winter arrives, the activity moves to the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa, Dubai … The Spanish case is, like the rest of tourism, highly seasonal. CLIA is the great unifier of the sector worldwide
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