Speaking during a roundtable event in London, David Dingle, who is also the chairman of Carnival UK, insisted that cruise was “only a small part of the problem”, but he said the sector wanted “to be a much greater part of the solution.”
“Cruise is a high visibility industry,” he said. “In Venice and Barcelona cruise tourism is less than 5% in both these places”, he pointed out.
“The cruise industry will do what it can to improve that situation but whatever the cruise industry does it won’t be a total solution for the environment. That’s in the hands of the wider tourism industry and local authorities in these cities.”
Dingle said the sector was already engaged in dialogue with authorities in Europe’s most popular cruise spots about managing visitor numbers.
“There are lots of things are we are looking at - how we work as an industry to smooth out cruise calls across the week for instance, like does one ship have a morning call and another an afternoon call in the same port,” he said.
“We need to think more carefully about how people are dispersed around a city so cruise tourists are much more dissipated around an area, so the impact on local tourists is not felt as much.”
He said discussions had been had with the Mayor of Dubrovnik “to see if we can smooth out cruise calls”, while in Barcelona he said the port authorities were “strong allies” on the matter.
Dingle also revealed that conversations had been had with Italian authorities to agree a different route to Venice without travelling down the Venice Lagoon. “The transport minister in Rome is signed up to getting it done,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the Italian government and authorities to get on with it”.
