After a two-year pandemic-induced hiatus, cruise ships have returned to the Halifax waterfront.
“Everybody’s extremely happy. I walked through the Halifax waterfront yesterday, many of the storekeepers and restaurants, excited to know that the cruise ship passengers are back, and there’s real momentum behind this,” said Sean Buckland with Ambassatours Gray Line.
Arriving with the morning sun, the Norwegian Getaway and Ocean Navigator docked at Halifax’s historic piers to bring in hundreds of passengers eagerly welcomed by small business owners along the waterfront.
“I love it. I got to meet people from literally every corner of the earth, and I love guessing people’s accents and where they’re from, and I’m often very close, not always. So, I missed it, terribly,” said Donna Hopper, the owner of Latte-Da Coffee Tea Bistro and Gifts.
The two cruise ships will be followed by another 150 vessel calls that Lane Farguson with the Halifax Port Authority says will peak during the fall.
“It isn’t until September, October when things really heat up in the cruise industry here in Halifax and that’s when we see upwards of 75 per cent of our total vessel calls. So, for this restart year, it’s actually not a bad thing to be able to build slowly into that,” Farguson said.
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Farguson says while typically cruise liners follow with a full complement of passengers, the industry is still easing back into being fully operational so it’s uncertain how many people will be aboard each vessel.
“Right now, people are still getting used to the idea of cruising again, so we expect that as the season goes on we’ll see more and more people filling those ships. And within a couple of years we should be back to where we were when we left off,” he said.
Farguson says the last cruise ships to visit Halifax were at the end of 2019, which is why the kickoff to this new season is fuelling high hopes of a return to a sense of tourism normalcy for local operators.
“We’re outpacing sales for 2019 right now, which is encouraging. It’s early days but it is very encouraging and the 2022 season looks excellent, it really looks like three years in one,” Buckland said.
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