POINTE BLANCHE--Port St. Maarten accommodated 1,901,617 cruise passengers in 2015, approximately five per cent fewer than in 2014 when the destination hit the two million mark (2,001,996; vessel calls 692) for the first time.
Cruise vessels made 683 port calls in 2015. Port St. Maarten has come in as the number one cruise port in the Caribbean the second year in a row, by CruiseFever.net readers who were asked to vote on the best cruise ports in the Caribbean in the 2015 Cruise Fever Fan Awards.
The other nine cruise destinations vying for the number one position were St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands; Cozumel, Mexico; Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands; Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos Islands; San Juan, Puerto Rico; St. Kitts; Oranjestad, Aruba; Ocho Rios, Jamaica; and Roatan, Honduras.
Cruise Fever has been featured in many media outlets, including the Drudge Report, CNN, Huffington Post, ABC News, Yahoo, MSN and ABC Radio. The website receives more than 200,000 visits a month, with some months reaching more than half a million. Cruise Fever was founded in the Spring of 2011 and is based in the United States.
According to Port St. Maarten management, the five per cent fewer passengers in 2015 was the result of a combination of factors such as hurricane season cancellations due to weather systems approaching the island, resulting in cruise vessels having to cancel their visits; opening of an expanded cruise port in Tortola; and redeployment of vessels to the Asian market.
Port St. Maarten remains number one in the Caribbean, according to a press release from the Port. Important developments for the country’s cruise industry in 2016 are cooperation with Princess Juliana International Airport SXM and the establishment of the St. Maarten Tourism Authority (STA) which is essential in destination marketing and product development.
The cruise industry is the most exciting and fast-growing category of the tourism travel market, which has seen average passenger growth of 7.2 per cent per year since 1990. Cruising is important for the sampling of destinations whereby travellers return as stay-over visitors. More than 80 per cent of cruise passengers think it is a good way to sample a destination and 40 per cent of cruisers stated in a survey that they had returned as stay-over guests after first visiting a destination during a cruise.
Therefore, Port St. Maarten finds it very important to develop a strategic relationship with SXM Airport and the yet-to-be-established STA to capitalise on these and other opportunities. More than 176 million travellers have taken cruises of two days or longer during the period 1980-2009. Seventy per cent of that number has been generated during the last 10 years and 40 per cent of the total passenger numbers has been generated during the last five years alone.
Cruise lines are repositioning to Asia, where they see significant growth opportunities as the market continues to develop and mature. There is the potential for double-digit growth in the Asian market in the next 10 years. China is expected to become the world’s second largest cruise market by 2017 and eventually will become the largest cruise market in the entire world.
Cruise lines also are looking for possible joint ventures, including port development and the potential to launch a domestic Chinese cruise brand in the rapidly growing China vacation market, as part of expanding their capacity in Asia. Key markets showing growth in Asia are China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea.
Port St. Maarten management said every effort was being made to keep the cruise destination in the number one position; however, this could not be done alone by the Port St. Maarten Group of Companies, but also must include various stakeholders to ensure long-term sustainable tourism development for the country and its people.
