Friday, December 1, 2017 - 10:53 by ce-press
Lerwick Harbour is on course for record cruise traffic next year, with advance bookings at 87 ships, which includes 11 maiden calls, scheduled to arrive between March and October.
The latest forecast was revealed on the final day of the season, September 27, when Norwegian Jade arrived on her fourth call of the year en route from Southampton to Reykjavik. It was the 70th call of year and brought total passenger numbers to 50,768.
A feature of the year has been poor weather or itinerary changes, causing cancellation of around 10% of planned calls. These tended to be larger vessels, meaning passenger numbers were around 20% down on early-season predictions.
Lerwick Port Authority is planning to deepen the approach channel and the berth at Mair’s Pier to provide alongside-berthing for a number of vessels which currently need to anchor and transfer passengers by tender. This will reduce any weather disruption for these cruise calls. Work has started on the consent required to dredge and it is hoped the work can take place in 2018.
Victor Sandison, senior commercial executive Lerwick Port Authority, said: “It’s been another great season, with record passenger numbers and other records narrowly missed because of poor weather disrupting a few arrivals. The significantly higher bookings for 2018 hopefully have enough margin to allow a few weather-related cancellations or itinerary-changes and still achieve record traffic, with over 90,000 passengers expected.”
