Rising tide of cruise liner business could lift all boats

Date Published: {J}

I was sweltering in the Turkish sun recently when I gazed at a wonderful sight in the harbour at Kusadasi – six luxury cruise liners all jockeying for a massive berth so that thousands of tourists could disembark and spend their euros and dollars by the dozen for miles around.

A few weeks before that, I was in Liverpool when an even bigger cruise ship docked right in front of the iconic Liver Building – again delivering thousands of tourists right into the heart of the city.

Make no mistake about it, this is the future of tourism for Galway too – and it’s a vision that the city’s newest Freewoman, Mary Bennett, in particular has been accentuating for a very long time.

Thankfully that vision is also shared by the Harbour Board and the state tourism bodies, who all see the development of the cruise ship business as fundamental to the redevelopment of Galway port.

But even then it’s a bit like the Volvo Ocean Race – you actually have to see it to realise its potential impact. And while we’re not even looking to compete with Kusadasi with its six cruise ships on a busy day, even a slice of that would represent a massive shot in the arm for so many aspects of local business.

The ancient city of Ephesus lies less than half an hour by bus from Kusadasi itself; on the day that these cruise liners visited town, that delivered an extra 15,000 visitors from the ships to this one tourist site alone. And that wasn’t even the half of it. All of those on board the liners seemed to be American. You recognise that for two reasons – firstly, they’re very, very loud, but also, because every other tourist in Kusadasi is Irish.

So it’s easy to gauge their impact because they are everywhere, and they are spending because these cruise passengers aren’t on a penny pinching tour of Europe – they’re there to spend.

Many of them hire their own drivers and people carriers; they don’t want to mix with the rest of us on the tour buses. But if snobbery delivers a little extra to the local economy, then who should stand in the way of progress?

Galway’s aspirations are more modest – initially at least – and the cruise liners will be a little further from the city centre. But the principle remains the same; give them the deep-water facilities to stop here and watch them spend their money.

And this isn’t just for the city either; a driver I met in Liverpool had spent the previous day taking passengers from the ship on a tour of castles and historic sites in Wales – so there’s every reason to anticipate that Connemara and the Burren, for example, would see a significant increase in visitors on the back of a cruise liner business.

Galway wants to rival Cork where studies have shown that the arrival of around 50 cruise ships a year is worth over €40m to the local economy and supports more than 300 full-time jobs.

Next month an influential delegation of world tourism chiefs and cruise-line operators will visit Galway with a view to establishing the city as a destination port as the next crucial stage in this process.

The visiting delegation will include the head of Jamaican tourism and some of the largest cruise-line operators in the world, whose multi-billion dollar undertakings are based in Miami and operate in destination ports across the globe.

The beauty of all this – and with all due respect to the wonderful city of Cork – is that Galway already has an internationally recognised brand. We can thank Bing Crosby for immortalising Galway Bay in song, but at least it saves us the bother of having to explain where the sun goes down. We have some of the most wonderful, unspoilt beauty on our doorstep, but the problem in the past was getting them there when they might only have a day or two to spend in Ireland. So here’s the perfect solution.

The downgrading of our airport will undoubtedly have an effect on our tourist industry, but – while that’s a battle still worth fighting – the cruise ship business has the potential to dwarf that in terms of delivering decent spenders right to our door … or docks.

Galway proved itself to the world with the success of the Volvo Ocean Race two years ago and hopefully it will do that all over again next summer – but the biggest debate after the stopover was how would the city and county harness this to the benefit of all in the longer term.

Well here it is – developing the harbour to take in the big cruise liners, delivering the passengers into the city for shopping and sightseeing, food and drink, and then showing them the natural beauty of Connemara and the Burren, Mayo’s Ceide Fields, Westport, the Shannon and every other part of the west while we’re at it.

Someday we might look out on Galway Bay and see cruise ships lining up to dock overnight in our waters; it’s really just about using the natural resources we were blessed to be born with.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.