VISITING

The growth of cruise-ship traffic in and out of Barcelona’s port has led to it being ranked the busiest cruise-ship port in Europe, and the fifth busiest in the world. With its most recent terminal finished in 2008, Barcelona has a total of seven terminals serving cruise ships, including some capable of holding the biggest passenger ships now plying the Mediterranean. Barcelona’s port authority reports that on busy days this year, as many as 10 cruise ships have arrived at the same time.

Small wonder that the traffic of cruise-ship passengers through the city has been lauded by representatives of Barcelona’s tourism industry as one of the few positive developments in an otherwise less than stellar year. Over two million cruise-ship passengers passed through the city in 2008, a 17.5 percent increase over the previous year: there were 882 embarkations, nine percent above 2007’s numbers. What’s more, in the first four months of this year the number of cruise-ship passengers was up by 18 percent over the same period of the record-breaking year before, thanks in large part to the city’s port authority having convinced two of the largest cruise ship companies, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line, that it would be worth their while to extend their operating season in the port to include the winter months of November to February. And all this in times of economic crisis when the overall number of foreign visitors to Catalunya dropped 3.6 percent in 2008, and a further 12 percent in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year.

An important factor in considering the potential windfall from cruise-ship traffic for the local economy is the percentage of embarkations that are simply ports of call, compared to what the industry calls ‘turnaround’ ports, or ports where a cruise both begins and finishes. With food and lodging already included in the price of their cruise-ship holiday, passengers getting off at ports of call typically try to limit their spending. However, in turnaround ports, passengers will spend at least a day and night in the city, including time in hotels and restaurants. What’s more, turnaround ports are where cruise ships do the bulk of their provisioning, a substantial expenditure for a ship such as the Voyager of the Seas that carries up to 3,800 passengers and a crew of 1,200 including roughly 200 cooks. Of the 55 cruise-ship liners frequenting the port of Barcelona, more than 55 percent have chosen it as their turnaround port, according to Carla Salvadó, cruise ship manager for the Barcelona port authority.