But the decision to continue to sail into Milford Sound saved the cruise business in the South, one Port Otago executive says.
The schedule for cruise ships across the country was released this week and Dunedin has a schedule of 79 ships coming to the city, compared with 94 scheduled visits last year.
Port Otago general manager customer Craig Usher said the numbers were not great but a lot of the drop was for factors outside the control of New Zealand companies and authorities.
“It’s a big impact. And it’s a wider impact for everybody.
“There’s all the tour operators that rely on this. Domestic tourism’s good, but I know some of them — this is a big chunk of their revenue for the season.”
Mr Usher said everyone in the cruise industry was working hard to get back on track.
New Zealand was a very small piece of the cruising pie.
“From a market perspective, they’ve got 40% of the cruise volume globally in the Caribbean. And we’re [New Zealand] 1%. And with Australasia as a whole group, we’re sort of just under 5%.”
Mr Usher said things had changed after Covid.
“Historically, they [cruise lines] used to have this thinking ‘we want to cover the world because that’s what cruising does’.
“Post-Covid, the cruise lines lost tens of billions of dollars, didn’t get any financial support through any of that. And now they’re on a strict profit-and-loss basis like every business.
He said New Zealand was still in the top five places people wanted to visit.
Competition was fierce between countries.
“There’s products opening up all over the world. Australia is pushing hard to get people into the Kimberleys.
“The Middle East are building new terminals, new beaches.
“For us, it’s natural beauty, our arts, cultural history, that sort of thing in nature that we want to keep selling to people. And Fiordland’s critical for that as well.”
He said banning ships from going into Milford Sound would have killed the cruise business in the South Island.
Biofouling was a big thing and carriers did struggle with it at times.
Passengers would be left in limbo, sitting on their stranded boat which had to be cleaned 12 nautical miles off the coast as it failed to meet strict New Zealand biosecurity standards.
“Then all this time you could have 1000-5000 passengers sitting on board going, ‘this is my cruise of a lifetime and I’m stuck outside of New Zealand. I don’t ever want to come back to this country again’.”
The Port of Auckland was in the final stages of developing an in-port biofouling solution to clean ships.
There were no major changes for the port this season and all staff had returned for another year.
There were 19 days when two ships would berth. But the ships on those days would not be huge as the port did not want up to 5000 people coming into the city.
A Disney cruise ship — never seen before in Dunedin — could have berthed on Christmas Day in Dunedin but with the port and city effectively closed, Port Otago decided against it. The Disney ship was now heading to Milford Sound.
The first ship, Carnival Splendor, would arrive in a month’s time, while Norwegian Spirit would be the final ship of the season on April 15.
Giant ship Ovation of the Seas would not be sighted this year but sister ship Anthem of the Seas, with a capacity of 4100, would make an appearance.
Larnach Castle general manager Adrian Clifton said cruise tourism was important to Larnach Castle’s business. Over the years, Larnach Castle had intentionally built a balanced market, which helped withstand fluctuations in individual sectors.
“We are fortunate that, this year, the drop-off in Dunedin is not as large as elsewhere in the country. However, we are keen to see cruise numbers lift again.”
Enterprise Dunedin operations manager Suzanne Jenkins said cruise tourism would continue to play a vital role in Dunedin’s economy — benefiting tour operators and attractions, transport providers, retailers, restaurants, bars and travel agents.
