Barcelona port already planning new cruise ship terminal

Cruise ships are getting bigger and visiting more often. This combination of factors means that Barcelona's harbour is becoming too small, too fast. That's why the authorities are already planning to build cruise ship terminal number eight by the adjacent dock, which would join the one that Carnival will have built by 2016, as announced in September. The President of Barcelona's harbour, Sixte Cambra, told this newspaper that the port's authorities are "working" on the new terminal and that they have yet to decide "whether it'll be public or private", that is, whether it'll be run by one of the cruise ship operators or it will be built by the port to house several operators.

Besides that fact that the port expects to keep growing, the decision to expand the existing facilities is an attempt to cater to "the needs of the new ships", Mr Cambra said in an interview that we will print tomorrow. The Oasis of the Seas, the world's largest ship, will stop over at Barcelona this year. Its twin vessel, the Allure of the Seas, will do so in 2015. "With the infrastructures currently in place, these ships need to operate in two different terminals at the same time, which requires more infrastructure to deal with the same number of boats", Mr Cambra explained. "The way that ships are evolving has prompted us to go ahead and increase the number of terminals", he added.

The last few extensions of the harbour's cruise ship terminal have been spearheaded by private operators. Terminal D, also known as Palacruceros, belongs to Carnival, the world's leading cruise ship company. Carnival-owned Italian firm Costa used it for the first time in 2007 after investing €12M in the project. The same group is committed to building the port's seventh terminal, with a €20M investment, and to expanding Palacruceros with a new 1,300 m2 building. But even before the seventh terminal is opened, the port is already thinking about terminal number eight.

In the first quarter of this year, over 250,000 cruise ship passengers visited Barcelona; that's 14 per cent up from last year. In 2013 Barcelona's harbour nearly matched its record number of passengers in a single year: 2.6M in 2011. Despite the growth in the first few months of 2014, the harbour will have fewer visitors than last year, Sixte Cambra was quick to admit. But the President of the harbour is hopeful that the figure will grow again soon and he feels that this year's slight drop is due to "some unrelated business decisions", in an industry that is very concentrated and dominated by only four companies. Cambra explained that this year's schedules were still decided in a recession climate and this suggests that, starting next year, there will be a "big growth" in the number of passengers arriving at the port, which will justify the new investment.

Barcelona's port is the leader in the Mediterranean sea and only the large Florida harbours, from which the Caribbean cruise ships depart, have a greater passenger volume worldwide. The objective set by Mr Cambra is "to consolidate our leading position and keep growing". In order to do so, besides increasing its capacity, they are working to make the business less seasonal, boosting its activity from November to May, which is the low season.

A record weekend

Only this weekend the harbour saw a new record number of visitors for the year. Yesterday 31,600 passengers from seven ships passed through its facilities. Five of them were turnaround operations, either starting or ending their cruise in Barcelona. Their passengers are the kind that has the greatest impact on Barcelona and Catalonia financially speaking, because they have more time to travel around the area than those visitors who are just stopping over. This week the port announced that Barcelona's Board of Tourism has estimated that turnaround passengers spend a daily average of €114, whereas in transit visitors spend €61. From these figures we can estimate that the impact of the visitors who arrived in Barcelona on Sunday was €3.5M, not including the revenue generated by the port's own activities.

Also, shops were allowed to open on Sunday to make the most of the incoming tourists, as part of an increase in the number of holidays when retailers may choose to work. The harbour's next big day is set for September, when the Oasis of the Seas is due to visit. The weekend of September 12-14, 58k cruisers will arrive in Barcelona, which is more than the 47,560 that had visited between Friday and yesterday.

With the influx of cruisers, yesterday the harbour's authorities set up a new exclusive boarding facility for cruise ship passengers. This will be in operation until October 27. Mr Cambra mentioned that better connections are critical for sustained growth: "The key is a direct air connection". That's why the President of the harbour believes that the new semi-direct route to Beijing announced by Air China a few weeks ago "opens up the possibility to sell cruise ship holidays in Asia".