Cruises resume in France, two boats set sail from Marseille

The tourist boat industry, which has helped spread the Covid-19, is resuming its cruising speed. Two liners from MSC Cruises and Costa Cruises embarked on Sunday, July 4, thousands of passengers in the port of Marseille, the first French stopover in several months for a very supervised recovery, the companies announced.

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Some 1,200 passengers left Marseille, France’s leading cruise port, on board the MSC-Seaside at the end of the afternoon. Patrick Pourbaix, Managing Director of MSC Cruises France, said “Very confident” as for the sanitary protocol – which does not require the vaccination of passengers but several antigenic tests – since “ we resumed in August 2020 in Italy, we embarked 70,000 passengers with this same protocol without any problem ”.

“What we have put in place for cruise ships goes well beyond what we can see on land”, he insisted to Agence France-Presse (AFP). MSC has already carried out two test cruises departing from Marseille with only a few hundred passengers on board in June.

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The protocol provides in particular for “Bubble excursions” during which passengers make very supervised visits in groups of 35 people maximum. “We can’t get out of it freely, that’s for sure”, admitted Mr. Pourbaix “But we benefit from VIP visits in small groups”.

Growth halted by the health crisis

The Seaside, which is on a 7-day Mediterranean cruise open for booking only two months earlier, will be “At 50% of its capacity” only, against a gauge of 70% maximum, specified Mr. Pourbaix. With very low prices, half-empty boats and only 50% of the active fleet, “We cannot speak of profitability, but we are once again attracting people to cruising”, he admitted.

For its part, Costa Cruises (Carnival group) also welcomed in a press release the return to France of the Costa-Smeralda. He took 700 passengers on Sunday.

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The restart will be gradual: thirty-seven stopovers are scheduled in July and August by the two leaders in the sector, ie a few thousand passengers. This is still far from the approximately 2 million passengers per year before the health crisis.

The Covid-19 has abruptly stopped continuous growth for 10 years in the sector, after a peak in 2019 at 29.7 million passengers worldwide, including 15.4 million North Americans and 7.7 million Europeans, according to a report by the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), the cruise line association.

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The World with AFP