By Virginia López Valiente
Managing Director of Cruises News Media Group and Editor of CruisesNews magazine
Editorial from CruisesNews magazine no. 40 – March 2017
A few days ago, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at a conference on cruises and ferries at a university. Most of the attendees were students, presumably from various degree programs or specializations, although we were at the naval engineering school. There was a clear interest in dissecting every aspect of the sector and exploring all its angles, with national guests from different business areas and a few international experts as well. Although the event was geared towards the academic sphere, I was invited to speak about industry trends. In the almost two hours I spent there before my presentation and during the previous speakers' talks, I noticed that all the questions from the audience were filled with the same old clichés, if they weren't outright statements about recent news stories.
What a lack of information! We've made very little progress.
Once again, I found myself in an environment where I really only had to provide four facts to make it clear that information is not being provided correctly, and that we shouldn't believe everything we read, especially if the headline is yellow and yellow.
And what will the other tourist cities do to avoid the same overcrowding problem as Barcelona? When will they regulate the sector to protect the environment? And countless other questions that are attacks on the truth and poisonous assertions for anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about.
I always have to start by saying that I don't expect everyone to be passionate about cruises, and that, of course, you can't have all the information if only a few of you are distributing it. We shouldn't turn a blind eye to overcrowding because it's a specific issue, and although it's quite scandalous, at this point, nobody's going to deny that cruises have a polluting component. However, I had to explain three or four things that, once explained, sound very clear and sensible.
Barcelona received a similar number of cruise ship passengers in 2011 as in 2016, but back then, in the midst of the crisis, the feat was applauded. I don't see how Barcelona could possibly know the number of tourists who enter the city each day by car or bus. They'll arrive in the morning, wander around the city, leave at night, and won't pay any tourist tax.
Spain received more than 75 million tourists in 2016, compared to the 8 million cruise passengers that Puertos del Estado (State Ports Authority) counts.
Cruise ships, their emissions, their fuel, and their waste are all perfectly regulated and self-regulated. For every cruise ship less than 10 years old that touches our shores, there are hundreds of cargo ships over 25 years old that dock in our ports. I didn't read anything about any pollution whatsoever regarding them.
If I were an industry-backed organization working for and promoting the cruise sector, defending its interests to introduce cruises as a vacation option in Spain, I would use my resources to train tourism students—those who will be our travel agents tomorrow—or our future journalists so that, having information, they can be critical of what they read or see and not take easy clichés for granted, or future politicians, engineers, architects, citizens in general, opinion makers, and “why not?”, potential cruise passengers.
