(CNS): The number of cruise passengers expected to visit the Cayman Islands in future years is predicted to drop significantly, Tourism Minister Kenneth Bryan said following recent meetings with the cruise lines. Without a cruise berthing facility in George Town, Carnival and Royal Caribbean are still refusing to tender their larger ships, and as they increase the number of those mega vessels in this region, the number of passengers calling will decrease by around 50% by 2024.

Speaking at the Cayman Islands Tourism Association annual meeting on Thursday, Bryan, who has spent much of the last month on the road attending tourism-related events, updated the private sector members on the sector in general.

Speaking about the Florida Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA) Conference in the Dominican Republic earlier this month, he said the larger cruise lines had confirmed the likely decrease in passengers they will be bringing next year and the year after. Bryan said it was unfortunate, but “due to our lack of a walk-on, walk-off facility”, the larger ships are unwilling to tender, mostly because of the “time it takes to ferry passengers on and off the ships”.

But he stressed that the PACT Government would not go against the wishes of the people and there would be no dock. Instead, he has been engaging with other cruise lines with smaller ships to encourage them to make more calls over the year. He said discussions with lines operating smaller ships with passengers that have higher spending power were encouraging and they will still be coming and even increasing the number of calls.

By 2024, the annual cruise visitor numbers to Cayman will be around 746,000 as the major cruise lines cut calls to this destination. While that is around half the number of passengers seen at the peak of cruise tourism in 2019, the current tourism policy is to focus on the quality of guests rather than the number.

Overnight tourism is expected to gradually return to pre-pandemic numbers, with guests predicted to spend more when they are here during 2023, which will be the first full year of both stay-over and cruise tourism.

Bryan said he appreciated those focused on the cruise sector would need to prepare for the decline. He said that by 2024, Royal Caribbean will be bringing 100,000 fewer cruisers than in 2019, and Carnival is cutting the number of ships from 327 to 171 next year. Given the certainty of fewer cruise passengers but an increase in stay-over visitors, he advised business owners to “fine-tune” their operations and “be smart with your business decisions”.

In the meantime, he said, his ministry had been in “encouraging” discussions with cruise lines operating smaller ships with passengers with a higher yield, such as MSC Cruises and Holland America, and that Cayman could “look forward to their schedules being maintained and possibly increasing in the near future”.

But with airlift growing and market campaigns having the desired effect, the minister was extremely optimistic about the increase in the far more lucrative overnight market, which is already shaping up to be the best winter season on record. “The projections indicate that growth will continue in 2023 and capacity into the Cayman Islands will surpass 2019 numbers,” he said.

Even though American Airlines and other US-based carriers will be flying fewer people here during this coming winter season, the new Cayman Airways flight to LAX and other additional airlines coming to Cayman, overall airlift numbers are increasing by about 1% compared to 2019.

Marc Langevin, the outgoing CITA president and manager of the Ritz-Carlton, said that visitor numbers are finally back on track after the border closures. He said the three big hotels and other accommodation sectors were expecting the last three months of this year to be even better than the record-breaking 2019 season. The tourism ministry’s target for 2022 was 40% of the 2019 figure, which would equate to about 200,000 passengers and would easily be exceeded, officials have confirmed.