South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Port Canaveral full steam ahead with return of Norwegian Cruise Line
The last of Port Canaveral’s home ported cruise lines is ready to join the party as Norwegian Escape made its debut Saturday.
“We’re excited that Norwegian is finally back and at that point we’ll have all five of our brands up and operating,” said Port Canaveral CEO Capt. John Murray at the annual state of the port address last week.
The cruise line has only dipped its toes in the Florida waters since sailings have restarted after the industry’s shutdown due to COVID19 in March 2020. It first rejoined Caribbean action from Miami in August, but now with Norwegian Escape, it joins Carnival, Disney, Royal Caribbean and MSC Cruises sailing from the Orlando-area port.
The 164,600-ton,
4,200-passenger vessel is the largest the cruise line has ever sent to the port. The first of four ships in the fleet’s largest class debuted in 2015.
Escape is one of the cruise line’s best-rated ships. It has a lot of Florida influences, from the hull artwork from marine wildlife artist Guy Harvey to the first Margaritaville at Sea.
Also on board is a version of Miami’s famed Tobacco Road blues bar, a craft beer hall that partners with Wynwood Brewing Company and a food concept originally part of a dining partnership with restaurateurs Jose Mendin, Andreas Schreiner and Sergio Navarro of The Pubbelly Restaurant Group, which has several dining concepts in South Florida.
Other notable features of the ship include a massive water park, ropes course, a spa with a snow room.
The size of the ship is part of an ongoing trend at Port Canaveral, which is now home to Mardi Gras, the largest ship in Carnival’s fleet, and is expecting
another massive vessel later this month when MSC Meraviglia debuts at the port. It’s already home to one of the largest cruise ships in the world, Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas.
It bodes for a strong return after the dismal revenues seen during 2021, which only got back to business when Mardi Gras had its inaugural sailing on July 30. Since then, the port has steadily welcomed more ships, but only saw essentially two months of cruise revenue for the fiscal year, and in general, cruises make up 80% of total revenue to the port.
“It’s over, OK. We’re not going to talk about ’21 anymore,” Murray said.
Murray then detailed the jump from 2019, the last full year of operations for the port before the pandemic, compared to what the port projects for FY 2022.
In 2019, the port saw 689 cruise ship calls which had a maximum capacity of 5 million passengers. The port saw about 94% utilization seeing 4.7 million passengers.
For 2022, the port is
projecting 779 ship calls, which is 90 more than
2019’s total. At full capacity, it could see 6.6 million guests, although the port’s budget “conservatively” projects 4.1 million guests. That accounts for reduced capacity among its homeported ships, which have been running between 50% and 80% in the last couple of months as COVID-19 cases have dwindled.
The difference in capacity is coming from more ships and bigger ships,” Murray said, noting that of the 11 ships slated to home port in the coming year, nine have passenger capacity over
4,000 and only one is under
3,000.
“We’ve got big ships here at Port Canaveral now and a lot of capacity to fill that is a great opportunity for us to move those numbers up,” he said.
The port just welcomed MSC Cruises for the first time when it debuted MSC Divina in September. That ship and Meraviglia will switch up for continued presence at the port. Royal Caribbean also began home porting three ships for the first time.