B.C.’s cruise ship industry sees another record-breaking season

After coming to a standstill during the height of COVID-19 restrictions, the province’s cruise ship industry is seeing a major and welcomed turnaround.

The 2024 season closes out on Oct. 29, and the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority (VFPA) tells 1130 NewsRadio that it’s been another record-breaking year.

From March 11 to Oct. 29, the Canada Place terminal will have seen 327 cruises and welcomed 1.32 million passengers. The latter breaks the previous record for passengers by 80,000, set just last year.

“[We] actually saw Canada Place have six of its top 10 busiest days ever as well,” explains Chance McKee, the authority’s Trade Development Representative. “That included its second busiest day ever on April 29, when we had 20,000 cruise passengers pass through our Canada Place cruise terminal.”

He adds the economic spin-off from all those people is huge.

“When you’re looking at the economic impact… cruise lines, their passengers, as well as their crew, are spending about $1.1 billion locally every year. When you break that down, that’s approximately $450, on average, per cruise passenger spending on things like local tours, local attractions, hotels, restaurants. And when you look at that from the cruise line perspective, cruise lines are actually spending around $660 million every single year on local goods and services whenever they’re docked at the Canada Place cruise terminal, and that’s on things like provisioning their ships with any supplies that they may need, any food, beverage, etc. And they’re doing that with our local vendors and local businesses.”

McKee stresses the numbers are even bigger on a national scale.

“When you zoom out a little bit and look at the national level, the Port of Vancouver cruise industry actually injects about $3.3 billion into the Canadian economy every single year. And every ship that docks at Canada Place actually injects about $3 million into our local economy, every single call it makes.”

McKee says the uptick in passengers shows people are back to their old travel habits.

“I think there was so much pent-up demand from the COVID-19 pandemic, and we saw such a strong bounce back from 2023 from the pandemic. We were curious what 2024 would look like, but it looks like the demand is there, especially when you’re looking at the Alaska cruise market and the Port of Vancouver has a premier cruise port servicing the Alaska market.” 

McKee says the industry isn’t just good for the economy, but for jobs.

“Not just locally, but at the national level. It sustains about 17,200 jobs nationally.”

Looking ahead, the waters look calm.

“We do see 2025 and 2026, both cruise calls as well as passenger levels in line with what we saw in 2023 and 2024.”