With the christening of the “Aida Cosma”, cruise ships start the season with optimism

After two disaster years
With the christening of the “Aida Cosma”, cruise ships start the season with optimism

Optimistic start to the new cruise season: the athlete Kristina Vogel christened the “Aida Cosma” in the port of Hamburg with an elaborate music and light show at the weekend. The new flagship of Aida Cruises is the Rostock-based shipping company’s second ship to be powered by liquefied natural gas.

After two years of catastrophe, the cruise industry is again offering its customers the full program in the third year of Corona. Almost all ships are back in service, and more than 800 calls are scheduled in Germany alone.

The four major cruise ports of Hamburg, Kiel, Warnemünde and Bremerhaven all have twice and three times as many departures on the schedule as in 2021. In some ports, the number of calls even exceeded 2019, the last year before the pandemic, which contributed to the years of boom holiday popular with a loyal fan base.

The ships are also getting fuller. Tui Cruises wants to gradually return to normal utilization over the course of the year. Based on talks with shipping companies, it is also assumed in ports that full capacity should be restored on board.

This would be urgently needed for the income statement of the shipping companies, because the ships, which often cost hundreds of millions of euros and carry several thousand passengers, only pay off if they are fully occupied. For safety reasons, this was not the case in 2020 and 2021, when the ships sailed at all.

$20 billion loss

In 2020 there were 112 calls in Germany, and the following year 326. Now there are significantly more: in Hamburg alone, with its three cruise terminals scattered across the city, over 300 calls are planned. In Kiel there are around 250, in Warnemünde almost 150 and in Bremerhaven more than 110. From there it mostly goes to the Baltic Sea and towards Western Europe. In addition, there are the classic sunny areas in the Mediterranean. In addition to the big brands – the Carnival subsidiary Aida Cruises, Tui Cruises, a subsidiary of Tui and Royal Caribbean, and MSC Cruises – practically all well-known cruise operators are involved again.

No company likes to comment on how business will develop in 2021 on the German market. However, the annual balance sheet of the German Travel Association (DRV) provides a rough indication. Accordingly, the turnover of deep sea and river cruises was 1.1 billion euros and thus 52 percent less than in the first Corona year. “Compared to the time before Corona, sales have fallen by more than 80 percent within two years,” says the DRV.

From a global perspective, last year was just as disastrous for the industry as 2020. The big four – Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian and MSC – together made a loss of a good 20 billion dollars, after 21 billion the year before, according to the annual reports.

From the point of view of the industry, the fact that things should get better in 2022 is due to the pent-up desire to travel, which according to the DRV is also reflected in increasing advance bookings for cruises. “Companies are very confident that business will pick up and that significantly more destinations will be able to be targeted again from the summer and next winter.” Individual shipping companies also report a high and growing interest from customers, which had brought the cruise industry a permanent boom until 2019.

The industry is getting tailwind from Berlin

The Federal Foreign Office has now dispensed with the blanket advice to travelers to avoid cruises because of the unpredictable development of the pandemic. Like Germany in early April, many target countries have also lowered their corona rules. However, around the turn of the year it became apparent that a residual risk remains. For example, MSC had to suspend winter trips from Hamburg to major European cities because destination countries such as Great Britain and the Netherlands had issued strict Omicron rules. Tui Cruises had to “shorten or cancel a few trips” due to Covid cases on board.

Measured against hundreds of trips with hundreds of thousands of guests, such incidents are limited. The shipping companies refer to the success of the Corona rules introduced across the industry in the summer of 2020. “We have only had isolated cases on board the Mein Schiff fleet since our cruises started operating again,” says Tui Cruises. “Thanks to the proven health concept, it was possible to prevent further spread on board in any case, and we only had to make minimal adjustments to the route in a few individual cases.”

MSC Cruises emphasizes: “Because we always monitor and test 100 percent of the crew on board every cruise, we are able – thanks to our strict health and safety protocols – to detect cases that would have mostly gone undetected on land.”

Therefore, the shipping companies remain on the cautious side. While nationwide mask requirements and strict access rights linked to vaccination status fell at the beginning of April, cruise guests still notice very clearly that there is a pandemic: No adult comes on board without a double negative test result. Nothing works without a mask on arrival and departure and on board.

Also read:

– “Norwegian Prima”: This is what NCL’s new flagship looks like

– Baptism of “Mein Schiff 3”: Helene Fischer lets the champagne bottle crack

– MSC cruise boss: “Only two percent of all vacationers take a cruise – there is still potential”

tib/DPA