Cruise News - Maritime News

According to analysts, cruise reservations grew 320% year-on-year in that huge country and went from one hundred thousand to half a million travelers in Mumbai alone.

For various reasons, until recently the mythical country was considered a difficult place for the cruise industry, and almost no shipping company was encouraged to bring a mega cruiser to its ports.

The demand for cruises in India exploded in such a way that some ensure that all ships that include their ports on the itinerary will have their capacity filled.
         
But now many of the top managers of global shipping companies believe that everything is possible in a gigantic country and in which the demand for cruises seems to have gone mad.

Between the 2017/18 and this 2019/20 periods, the number of cruise ships that India visits has increased fourfold, from 138 to 580 for next season.
While in the port of Mumbai alone, passenger traffic increased from 176,000 to 565,000 in the last two seasons.

The boom is unprecedented in the cruise industry worldwide.

Potential for One Million Passengers?

The Karnika, with the capacity to receive up to 1700 guests and owned by the incipient local shipping company Jalesh, had also docked for the first time in Mumbai on April 17.
Since then he offers three weekly cruises, with 17 calls at the same port until June, when the monsoon season will force him to move his navigations to the Persian Gulf.

Jalesh's success in making reservations has made Costa Cruises now also ready to enter the region, just like Royal Caribbean Int.

"There could be perfectly about a thousand ships in a year, with one million passengers," Sanjay Bhatia, President of the Mumbai Port Trust, told reporters.

On the other hand, said Varun Chadha, CEO of Tirun Travel Marketing, a representative for India of Royal Caribbean Int, Celebrity and Azamara Club: “We are very excited that Spectrum of the Seas visits India”, "It is the largest and most innovative cruise ship that has hit these Indian coasts so far, and offers our guests."
"Its subsequent deployment in Singapore and by June in Shanghai will allow the Indians to access the best cruise to visit extremely interesting destinations in Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan," Chadha concluded.

Will the demand for cruises in India be maintained?

A closer look at the local experience is the responsibility of Nalini Gupta, Director of Costa Cruise India, who points out that cruise ships have become fashionable to celebrate weddings, extremely luxurious in that country.

Although theirs is a very traditionalist society, the Indians appreciate very much everything new. And in that category, the cruises enter, originality in that country.

That is why, despite the boom, the figure is still marginal in a country with more than 1.2 Billion inhabitants (the second in the world after China) and territory of 3,287,263 km2, which places it in the seventh place among the largest countries on the planet.
These same data leave the enormous potential for growth at the same time.
In that gigantic square, Costa's passengers grow by 25% year-on-year, which even reaches their availability.

Such demand presses the Italian shipping company to expand its offer, while the global cruise market also grows and the shipyards do not stop building one ship after another.

However, the Indian market presents some unique characteristics to the western shipping companies that raise doubts:

    • Demand is concentrated on short itineraries, with many stops at the same ports.
    • Despite the success of sales, the average purchasing power in India does not   compare with that in Western countries.

Enough to survive even some fear of not filling the ships ...several attempts in the past years to establish cruise operations for the Indian market have failed. Maybe this time it will be different.