Mega Ships or Mega Hassle

Christening of a mega-ship is an event characterised by sheer wonderment, lots of press coverage and potentially, thousands of bookings for each voyage.  Every one of the mega-ships, built or planned, will be larger in population than many small towns in New Zealand, and most certainly, some of the port cities they will visit.  Therein lies the problem.

Whilst the cruise line will be thrilled with the fact that it has filled each of its more than 5,000 berths and pleased that it is carrying a full crew complement of more than 2,000, how would a port town such as Lyttelton in New Zealand (pop: 3,400) or even the larger Freeport Maine (pop: 7,800) cope with such a large, mobile city arriving at its shores?

The realities are many.  For example, the initial reaction of local businesses may be one of glee, predicting great windfalls by day’s end but the reality is that there is only so much product available on any given day. There are only so many seats in each cafe, T-shirts on the rack of the souvenir store, places for people to stand in the museum and tickets which can be sold on local buses.

Operationally, the bridge at the start of the river may be too low to permit the ship to sail under it or the berth too short to allow it to be tied up safely.  Socially, the mega ship can represent excesses which can threaten to destroy a carefully developed local cruise tourism environment.  Visions of legions of passengers flooding small town streets, added pollution, the noise of open deck announcements and sailaway parties and the pressures on local services such as emergency, medical, water and police can all the mega-ship an unwelcome visitor.   

Short of asking the mega-ships to stay away, the solution needs to be mega-management.  It is pointless for a local council or port authority to agree to port calls unless they have involved not only local stakeholders, but also the cruise lines themselves.  For example, without an audit of capacity and facilities of existing terminals by expert cruise line representatives, the terminal operators could find that their baggage area is woefully inadequate, that there aren’t enough power plugs for the check-in staff’s laptops and that all 7,000 souls onboard converge on the single gangway at the same time.

In town, the visitors’ centre needs to add more staff and space for serving larger numbers of passengers whilst additional shuttles, drivers and guides will need to be sourced.   

In effect, all stakeholders and their attractions, services, amenities and activities need to be prepared to welcome a whole new town to their shores for an eight to ten hour visit.  A lot of planning for a lot of people for a very compressed amount of time.