Cruise sector feeling berthing pains with industry ‘hitting the wall’ at Canada Place
Vancouver’s cruise terminal at Canada Place will experience its first ‘full house’ of three ships Sunday in what is expected to be a banner year, but the cruise business might be hitting its limits, an industry association warns.
This season the Port of Vancouver is expecting 32 ships to make 241 separate calls on Vancouver with 895,000 passengers, a seven per cent jump from 2017. But it is a volume that is starting to squeeze existing facilities, said cruise industry representative Greg Wirtz.
The cruise sector is a cornerstone of Vancouver’s tourism industry with each ship’s visit generating an estimated $2 million in local spending, according to Port of Vancouver economic impact studies.
“(Cruise lines) are growing, but they ’re hitting the wall, effectively, at Canada Place,” said Wirtz, president of the Cruise Lines International Association’s North West and Canada division, with bigger ships carrying more passengers.
“And the industry association and its members, we’re all looking for a signal from the port that there is a plan, a forward looking plan that describes how we’re going to operate in the future,” Wirtz said.
Katherine Bamford, the Port of Vancouver’s director of trade development, said in a prepared statement that the port is working on such plans.
In the meantime, Wirtz said busy days strain the facilities at Canada Place.
On Sunday, for instance, 10,400 passengers are expected to cycle through the terminal, which won’t even be the busiest multiple-ship call in May.
The terminal is expecting 13,000 passengers to be dropped off and picked up by three ships on May 12 and then 14,500 are expected May 13 with four separate ships docking at different times on that day.
“It’s not good for the passenger experience,” Wirtz said of those busy days, which can see long lineups and delays for ground transportation.
“I don’t think it’s good for Vancouver and its reputation, and it’s certainly not good for the cruise lines.”
It is a situation that has been building for the cruise sector since the Port of Vancouver permanently closed Ballantyne Pier in 2014 as a second cruise terminal.
Located just east of the Centerm container terminal off Heatley Avenue at the waterfront, Ballantyne is in a grittier, industrial neighbourhood a bit more distant from main tourism attractions, but Wirtz said it still worked for cruise lines.
“I can’t say (Ballantyne Pier) was ideal, but these things are all relative,” he said, adding that it helped create a balance on days when multiple big ships called on the port, allowing cruise lines to spread the traffic congestion across two terminals.
Future planning will be more important, Wirtz said, as cruise lines phase out older ships and bring in newer, bigger ships that can’t easily fit beneath the Lions Gate Bridge. There are already a handful on the Alaska cruise business that sail out of Seattle.
Vancouver will see one of those ships, the Norwegian Bliss, on Sept. 30 when the 330-metre-long leviathan makes a repositioning stop, but Wirtz said it will arrive at 3:30 a.m. on a low tide and needs to wait almost 24 hours in port before leaving, which is a less-thanideal schedule for a regular Alaska cruise itinerary.
Bamford, in her statement, said the decision to stop using Ballantyne Pier was made to centralize operations and immigration services in one location, since only a small number, between one and four per cent, of ships were using the facility.
Bamford acknowledged that larger ships are becoming an issue for ports worldwide, and Vancouver might see up to one million cruise passengers in a few years.
“We, along with the industry, are developing short-term and longterm plans to address the growth,” she said.
The port has done some preliminary exploration work on accommodating increased traffic, Bamford said, looking at all options including potential locations for a new terminal and further improvements to Canada Place.