Cruise ship business soared during fall
By Janis L. Magin
Associated Press
The number of visitors arriving in Hawai'i on foreign cruise ships jumped this fall by 58 percent over last year's figures, state tourism officials said yesterday.
Advertiser library photo • Oct. 8, 2001
According to a new cruise visitor study, 41,310 people visited the state on foreign ships from September to November, said the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.
The cruise liner Carnival Spirit was tied up dockside at Aloha Tower, so large it occupied Piers 10 and 11. Amid a post-Sept. 11 tourism slump, the number of visitors arriving in Hawai'i on cruise ships increased over last year.
The numbers are projected to rise. Cruise ship visitors to Hawai'i will increase to 250,000 next year, from 160,000 this year, according to projections released earlier this month by the North West Cruise Ship Association.
DBEDT plans to keep tabs on the cruise ship industry with regular reports.
"This study will be an ongoing analysis of cruise visitors to Hawai'i and the most consistent source of data on cruise passengers the state has ever developed," said Seiji Naya, department director. "It is very encouraging that despite the events of September 11 we experienced strong growth in the number of cruise passengers over the last several months."
The new figures represent a bright spot in an otherwise dismal tourism picture since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In November, visitor counts were down 27 percent from the previous year, and the number of Japanese visitors has fallen nearly 60 percent from a year ago.
Hawai'i's cruise ship business suffered a blow in October when American Classic Voyages declared bankruptcy, taking the only U.S.-based cruise company and the Hawai'i home-ported cruise ships SS Independence and ms Patriot out of the islands.
However, the entrance of the 2,200-passenger Norwegian Star, which will have its home port here, and its sister ship the Norwegian Wind, which will spend six months a year in the islands, has introduced the prospect of a brighter future. Both ships will run interisland cruises with a stop on Fanning Islands to meet federal regulations governing U.S. ships.
Another factor that may help: Since Sept. 11, some cruise lines have rerouted their ships away from foreign ports to tour Hawai'i and other U.S. destinations.
A total of 10 foreign cruise ships made 26 trips around the islands from September to November, stopping on O'ahu, Maui, Kaua'i and the Big Island, state tourism officials said.
Most of them were larger than the nine ships that cruised the islands during the same period in 2000, carrying 26,149 visitors.
Fewer than 2 percent of the visitors aboard the foreign cruise ships were Hawai'i residents. Half of all passengers, or 20,347, were from the East Coast, while 31 percent, or 12,638, were West Coast residents. Canadians accounted for 10.4 percent of passengers, and Europeans 4.7 percent.
