Tenerife ports will start again accommodating cruise ships in late October. Their maximum occupancy will be 60%, and the average weekly number of passengers – 1500 people.
The port executives of Santa Cruz de Tenerife held a meeting with representatives of municipal authorities and transport companies on Friday in order to work out the main lines of cooperation in anticipation of the new cruise season. The parties are currently in awaiting of authorization from the Canary Islands Ministry of Health that should guarantee the viability of the upcoming cruise season in the new circumstances.
According to the current information, TUI, the largest German tourist operator, should resume cruise operations to Tenerife from the end of October.
As mentioned above, the occupancy of cruise liners will not exceed 60%. In addition, excursions and other leisure activities during the stay of tourists ashore will have to be carried out in fixed mini-groups. The Mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Jose Manuel Bermudez expressed the idea to create a special leisure offer for the persons taking such cruises
TUI’s cruise ship routes will run still just through the Canary Islands. The base ports of cruise ships will be the ports of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas; that’s where tourists will go on trips through the waters surrounding the Canary archipelago.
That is a very important and positive news for the cruise industry in Spain, which dropped very much due to the sanitary crisis. In the first 7 months of the year, passenger traffic was 7.75 million people, down 61.2% from the same period last year.
Before the crisis, the cruise sector in Spain rose steadily. In July 2019, the number of cruise liners admitted by Spanish ports was 322 – 3.1% more than in July 2018, and the number of passengers was 966,292 – 5.2% more than in 2018. In 2020, for the period from January to July (i.e. for 7 months), Spanish ports received 590 cruise ships, down 73.5% from the same period of 2019 (2231).
At the same time, the importance of the cruise industry for the Spanish economy could not be overemphasized: it accounts for €4.5 billion a year and more than 33,000 job opportunities.
