One of Vancouver’s longest-ever cruise seasons comes to a close today when the Ruby Princess leaves Canada Place for Los Angeles.
Despite this, Port Metro Vancouver (PMV) expects a slight dip in total passengers during the season.
PMV projects that a total of about 805,000 passengers will have sailed on 32 ships making 228 voyages during the 2015 cruise season.
Last year, 812,095 passengers sailed on cruises that stopped in Vancouver, according to PMV numbers.
The extra-long season is a result of multiple Princess Cruises sailings to Hawaii before the main Vancouver-to-Alaska run started and after it completed.
Late-season sailings to California are historically common.
This year, however, there was also a northbound sailing to Vancouver from California on November 30, which is later than ever before, according to Carmen Ortega, Port Metro Vancouver’s (PMV) business development manager.
Ortega is optimistic about next year.
She expects the 2016 season will have more passengers than any year since 2009, at approximately 829,000 passengers. In 2009, the total passenger count was 898,473.
She expects one fewer sailing next year but that the total passenger count will rise because cruise lines are using bigger ships.
Her passenger-count projection for 2016 remains far below 2002’s 1,125,252-cruise-passenger total, but it’s substantially up from 2010 numbers, when Vancouver attracted what was then a 17-year low of 578,986 cruise passengers.
PMV data shows that the Vancouver cruise industry stimulates more than $2 million in economic activity for each vessel that stops at Canada Place.
That figure includes the estimation that there will be approximately 283,000 hotel-night stays in Vancouver and more than 440,000 hotel-night stays around the province. That generates, according to PMV, about 6,000 direct and indirect jobs and $220 million in wages as well as tax revenue for various levels of government.
