Our history. Our story.

She was accompanying her husband Iain who was there to promote Invergordon, a port in Cromarty Firth.

He happily remembers a visit from Brendan Corrigan of Carnival Cruise Line who visited the stand then and every year thereafter until he retired. “Although it would be 20 years before the first Carnival ship called at Invergordon,” he told me recently. Other regular visitors were Herman van Deursen from Holland America Line, Mike Ronan and Rick Strunck from Royal Caribbean and Michael Pawlus, then working for Royal Viking Line which was the only cruiseline to venture to visit Northern Europe at that time.

Michael Pawlus is now director of strategic itinerary & destination planning at Azamara, and commented: “I have been designing itineraries for 30 years now and Cruise Europe has been a valuable association for me as a source of port and destination information through the years as well as a great mechanism to establish relationships in the region.”

Having previously worked in the tourism business, Anne suggested it might be a good idea to form an association of ports to market the whole of Northern Europe as a cruise destination, principally to the US cruise operators who at that time concentrated on the Caribbean and Alaska and had little idea of what Europe could offer.

The following year a working party drawn from the ports of Bergen, Cork, Cromarty Firth, Ghent, Oslo, Rouen and Tilbury distributed a business prospectus to potential members under the working title of the North European Ports Co-Operative. Back then the idea, quite simply, was to encourage more cruise visits to the area and extend the season beyond June, July and August.

Aris Zarpanely from Equity Cruises was elected president, Mike Meyjes from the Port of Tilbury became the first executive manager and Lord Ambrose Greenway from Eurolist Ltd, which worked closely with Tilbury and Le Havre amongst others, volunteered to be secretary/treasurer.

The first council members were Bodil Andersen from Trondheim, Nils Standal from Bergen, Iain Dunderdale from Cromarty Firth, Sean Geary from Cork, Andre de Wilde from Ghent, Per Schmidt from Copenhagen, Jan Koster from Amsterdam and Mike Deeks from Falmouth.

The official launch took place at the Seatrade Cruise Convention in Miami which began in 1985 with just 200 attendees but now numbered 3,500. The first CE exhibition stand with four booth spaces cost £8,300 (€9,760) and so began the annual tradition of members sharing a stand.

Nigel Lingard, cruise industry management consultant and more recently moderator at CE conferences, was a keen supporter of the ‘ports consortium’ concept from the outset, and well remembers initial discussions with Ambrose Greenway and founder members.

“I think I may have attended every AGM since then,” he told CE. “At Fred. Olsen we were expanding the fleet, whilst looking for smaller ports in order to differentiate our product. CE gave potential cruise call ports an opportunity to reach out to us and demonstrate their USPs; whilst the annual meetings put faces to the names and helped to reassure cruiselines of the port management’s credibility. This process is, I believe, still as important as ever.”

A computer diskette (do you remember these!) was produced including distance tables of some 88 ports between Akureyri in the north and Cadiz in the south. It was here that plans for a yearbook showcasing member ports were hatched. The first was published in 1995, the year CE first exhibited at Seatrade Europe in Genoa.

During this year Royal Caribbean’s Splendour of the Seas was home-ported in Harwich and Dover opened a £9 million (€10.6 million) cruise terminal in the old railway station in the presence of Cunard’s Royal Viking Sun.

Membership numbered 69.

CE started gathering cruise statistics around about this time and It is interesting to note that in 1999 the top port in terms of cruiseship calls and passengers was Lisbon with 230 and 161,186 respectively, followed by St Petersburg with 187 and 114,517.

Demand had more than doubled from 1 million in 1995 to 2.1 million in 2000 and was estimated to reach 3.1 million by 2007.

Membership had grown to 93. Writing in the spring issue of Cruise Europe News, executive manager Mai Elmar attributed the success of the organisation, over and above the essentials of communication and marketing, down to enthusiasm, the diversification created by the membership and the professionalism gained by learning from fellow members.

Cruise Europe's annual statistics demonstrated the incredible growth that was taking place in the region at this time. In 2008 7.86 million passengers were recorded on 6,333 calls compared with 6.44 million and 5,684 respectively in 2007.

At the AGM in Le Havre in 2013, cruise analyst Peter Wild stated that the European source market reached 6.2m out of the world total of 20.6m in 2012. MSC Cruises’ head of port operations Captain Luigi Pastena said that his company made 467 calls at European ports the previous year carrying 1.4 million passengers. He estimated overall port costs totalled €18.5m, of which port charges contributed 63%.

Just five years ago, on CE 25th anniversary, Lord Amrose Greenway (who has written a detailed history available as a pdf on the CE website) summarised the association thus:

Looking back there can be no doubting the fact that, whether by luck or judgement, Cruise Europe was formed at the right time and in the right place. The organisation has survived and prospered over its first 25 years of existence and its success can be measured by the fact that its membership has grown from an initial 21 to nearly 120 in 2016.

Five years down the track, the membership consists of 130 ports and 15 associated members. And, despite the pandemic, CE remains an integral and proactive player in the cruise industry. In the past 18 months it has worked hard to update its members and the wider industry on changing situations and protocols and constantly updated its information and protocols in line with the cruiseline needs.

As the industry slowly returns, CE will continue to support its members and the industry by keeping pace with the changes, evolving and engaging with topical issues ranging from revised itinerary planning to environmental operations such as providing LNG and shore power in port.

Just recently Captain Iain Dunderdale MBE commented on the association’s achievements: “Great oak trees from little acorns grow, and Cruise Europe has grown from modest beginnings to a worldwide leader in its field today.”