More Growth for St, Kitts Cruise Tourism, Says Minister

With the theme, “St. Kitts and Nevis is working” leading up to the next general elections, the St Kitts-Nevis Administration says cruise visitor arrivals at Port Zante, St. Kitts, are expected to approach the half-million mark for the first time next season.

“This will represent an increase of 18 percent following a total of 419,266 berths currently being deployed at St Kitts for 2008-2009,” said St Kitts and Nevis’ Minister of State for Tourism, Senator Richard “Ricky” Skerritt.

“In 2009-2010 we are looking at a confirmed net increase of 52,564 berths and an unconfirmed increase of 22,029. This promises to bring our total berths deployed to St Kitts from October 2009 to September 2010, to 493, 859,” said Senator Skerritt who recently returned from his annual sales call on Florida-based cruise executives.

According to Skerritt, while sixty percent of cruise arrivals to St Kitts continue to be from Carnival Corporation family ships, the biggest contributor to next season’s increase is the fact that Royal Caribbean International/Celebrity Cruises will increase their deployment to St Kitts substantially by over 100 percent to 147,748 berths.

“They are pleased with the initial feedback from the calls at Port Zante of the recently launched Celebrity Solstice and they are looking at St Kitts with new eyes as far as itinerary development is concerned,” the Minister said.

Another contributor to this increase in arrival numbers is the return of one cruise line that has been missing for a while.

Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) will bring the 2,224-passenger “Norwegian Dawn” into St Kitts for ten calls every other Thursday starting on 26 November 2009, and the 2,400-passenger “Norwegian Jewel” will visit St Kitts on November 4 for one port call. These news NCL ships will result in 24,640 new cruise visitors for St Kitts.

Although Skerritt has repeatedly said he is less concerned with arrival numbers and more focused on increasing expenditure per visitor, he stressed that the tremendous increase in cruise arrivals over the past three years is an excellent indicator of the interest that the St Kitts brand has been generating in the cruise tourism market.