Will a cruise ship terminal be built in Delta?
It’s still early days but the growth in cruise ship business could result in that happening.
Photo: cruise ship at Canada Place / Shutterstock
Port of Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»president and CEO Robin Silvester recently told the Delta Chamber of Commerce the industry has been on a stable growth trend, one which has resulted in the port investing millions to improve the Canada Place terminal in Downtown Vancouver. However, it’s going to get harder to accommodate the new, much bigger cruise ships.
“We’re thinking hard about how we can accommodate that growth. So, we’ve invested about $15 million or so in Canada Place in the last couple of years to try to really maximize the efficiency of that facility and we’re doing a good job of that… but it’s also a reality that cruise ships are getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” he said.
Silvester noted the Port of Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»welcomed the Norwegian Bliss recently, which accommodates more than 4,000 passengers and is the largest cruise ship ever to visit Vancouver.
“It could only come in under the Lions Gate Bridge at three in the morning because it is bigger than anything that can get under the bridge at anything other than a low tide. So those are real constraints on how we can accommodate the largest vessels going forward,” he said.
Related:
- Vancouver’s 2018 cruise season marks largest-ever vessel, 25 million passengers
- Nearly one million passengers on 243 ship visits made 2018 Vancouver’s largest cruise season since 2010
- A new cruise ship terminal could be coming to Richmond
“We’re at the early stages of doing some work on looking at what we can do, how much more can we improve the efficiency of Canada Place, but also what options would there be for longer term for accommodating the largest ships that can’t rely on getting under the Lions Gate Bridge. It’s still too early to say whether it’s another cruise terminal. There are a lot of questions first about feasibility and then about commercial viability. We’re in the early stages of doing that work.”
According to the port, Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»welcomed more than 900,000 cruise passengers on 243 ship visits in 2018, a seven per cent increase in passenger volume over 2017. Cruise is a key economic driver for the region as each cruise ship adds about $3 million to the local economy.
