Cruise ship season kicks off in Vancouver, with a boost from Panama

The cruise ships and the crowds they bring to Vancouver are getting bigger, and you can thank (or blame) the newly expanded Panama Canal for that.

Vancouver’s 2017 cruise season kicked off Tuesday with the arrival of the Star Princess at __canada Place cruise terminal. That ship’s up to 3,100 passengers are the first of an expected 840,000 cruise passengers on 237 vessel visits expected in Vancouver this year, a two-per-cent increase over 2016.

“Were getting more calls, but also the calls we’re getting are bigger ships. They’re carrying more passengers,” said Carmen Ortega, the Port Authority’s manager of cruise services. “That’s the biggest change.”

The largest of the 33 vessels that will be making regular stops in Vancouver this year are the Ruby Princess and the Emerald Princess, each of which carry a maximum of 3,850 passengers.

“If you go back to when Canada Place was opened up, in 1986, the average ship size was 600 passengers,” said Greg Wirtz, president of the Canada Cruise Lines International Association, a trade group.

A decade ago, ships in the 2,000-passenger range were sailing out of Vancouver, Wirtz said. “Those ships were all what we would call Panamax or smaller, meaning a ship that fits through the Panama Canal.”

The cruise industry started building even bigger about 10 years ago, in anticipation of the expansion of the canal, a $5-billion US construction project that was completed in June of 2016.

“The cruise lines were building 4,000-passenger ships, but most of them stayed in the Atlantic,” Wirtz said.

Some of those ships came around South America to operate out of Vancouver over the years, Wirtz said, but with the bigger canal, “the floodgates have opened. … In the Caribbean, the biggest ships are 6,000 passengers.”

Meanwhile, Vancouver has seen cruise passenger numbers rise from just over 805,000 in 2015 to nearly 827,000 in 2016, to this year’s expected 840,000, the highest number since 2010.

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The Port Authority’s Ortega said as many as 16,000 passengers per day will be getting on and off cruise ships at Canada Place during the busiest days this season. They expect 14,000 people coming and going on May 6, the first day that three ships will dock at once.

The trade association’s Wirtz said capacity has dropped since the port decommissioned Ballantyne Pier as a cruise ship dock after the 2014 season, but Ortega said passenger movement has since been upgraded at Canada Place.

“This is a much better facility in terms of access to ground transportation,” she said.

On Tuesday morning, the Star Princess unloaded passengers who had sailed up from Los Angeles, and before noon, boarding had started for a cruise down the California coast. The Alaska cruise season starts at month’s end.

Downtown merchants are bracing for the traffic that will bring, said Charles Gauthier, president of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association.

“That’s a big one for us, the one that will generate some complaints,” Gauthier said, adding that the areas hardest-hit by cruise passenger traffic are also the ones that benefit from the business the tourists bring. “People aren’t going to walk a huge distance.”

The port authority estimates that each vessel visit at Canada Place generates nearly $3 million for the local economy.