Last month, construction on a new 80,000-square-foot cruise
terminal that will sit in the harbor between Town Point Park
and Nauticus. The facility will cost $36 million, and the city
will spend $5 million to renovate surrounding piers and Town
Point Park.
The terminal, scheduled to open in the fall of 2006, will add
even more force to a business that has been churning with momentum.
Two cruise lines—Holland America and Celebrity—decided
to make Norfolk a home port in 2004 for one of their ships,
despite Norfolk’s use of a temporary facility next to
Nauticus. As a result, Norfolk is one of the fastest growing
cruise line ports on the East Coast.
The terminal will be a corrugated-steel-and-glass building with
a maritime look to complement nearby Nauticus. It will have
a huge rotunda, perfect for hosting parties. It will be the
first cruise terminal in the nation to fully comply with Homeland
Security standards put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks.
This year, Norfolk expects to welcome about 114,000 passengers
this year. For security reasons, construction of the new terminal
may have to be temporarily halted during the height of the Norfolk
cruise season.
The latest rendering of this state-of-the-art facility can now
be viewed online on the homepage of www.cruisenorfolk.org.
The Port Committee of the Port of Barcelona officially granted
a 25-year concession on January 26 to Costa Cruises, the main
cruise operator in the Catalan port, for an area extending over
nearly 20,000 square feet on the Adosado Pier, where the company
will build and manage a new cruise terminal. The construction
of the new terminal, where Costa and other members of the Carnival
Corporation & plc group will be given berth priority, will
begin in a few months. The terminal should be operational by
the beginning of the 2006 summer cruise season. The amount to
be invested in this project is approximately 8 million euros,
to be paid entirely by Costa.
The architectural designers Luigi Vicini e Andrea Piazza of
the company Studio Vicini in Genoa, who were involved in designing
the Savona Palacrociere terminal managed by Costa, have been
commissioned to develop the terminal’s overall design.
For the executive design stage, Studio Vicini will be assisted
by the Sener engineering firm in Barcelona. “We’re
very pleased that our project to build a new terminal in Barcelona,
a leading port in Europe and a key port for our cruises in the
Mediterranean, is continuing,” pointed out Gianni Onorato,
President of Costa Crociere. “For this I would like to
thank the Port Authority of Barcelona. With this new terminal,
our objective is to confirm our leadership in the port, guaranteeing
excellent services to all the guests who call on Barcelona.”
Costa is the first company in Europe to implement a cruise terminal
direct management development policy, as demonstrated by the
investments and direct management activities not only in Barcelona,
but also in terminals in Savona and La Romana, along with the
agreements reached with the port authorities of Naples and Civitavecchia.
In 2004, Costa made 96 calls to Barcelona, bringing approximately
215,000 passengers (up 33% compared to last year and 21% of
the total port figures). All the members of Carnival Corporation
& plc, Costa included, made nearly 200 calls to Barcelona
in 2004, bringing approximately 346,000 (up 15%) passengers.
The numbers for Costa are expected to increase significantly
in 2005 to 128 calls and 335,000 passengers (up 55% with respect
to 2004), with the calls by the Costa Fortuna and Costa Magica.
These two flagships, each with a capacity of 3,470 passengers,
will make calls to the Catalan port every Friday and Tuesday,
respectively, in the summer of 2005.
The Port of Barcelona, Europe’s leading cruise port, currently
operates six terminals utilized exclusively for cruise ships.
In 2004, it handled 1,021,407 cruise passengers, and more than
half of them chose Barcelona as their embarkation/disembarkation
port.
The 89 North European port members of Cruise Europe received
4.7m passengers on 5,165 calls during 2004, according to statistics
published in the latest issue of Cruise Europe News. Compared
to 2003, calls were up by 4.2 percent and passenger numbers
up by 10.5 percent, notes the newsletter. As in the previous
year Southampton tops the list with 548,000 passengers on 205
calls, followed by Copenhagen with 320,000 visitors on 264 calls.
Comparing the two ports’ traffic, almost 100 percent of
Southampton’s calls are turnarounds whilst 66 percent
of Copenhagen’s arrivals are transits. Only 34 ports broke
down figures by passenger nationality, making it difficult to
draw firm conclusions, reports Agust Agustsson, editor of the
newsletter. ‘However it is very clear that French visitors
to North Europe, Baltic and UK have not increased since 2003
and are very low compared with German and UK figures which indicates
that the French source market is far from being utilized,’
he writes in the editorial column.
Tunisia’s main cruise port is planning to build an additional
berth and new cruise terminal. Tunis La Goulette, located on
the outskirts of the city, accounts for the majority of the
country’s total cruise passenger arrivals. In 2004 the
port accommodated almost 320 cruise vessels with more than 400,000
passengers. In passenger volume Tunis ranks seventh among the
Western Mediterranean cruise ports.
