The Vigo-based website InfoCruceros.com will celebrate its 20th anniversary on Thursday, September 8th with an event at the Port of Vigo, bringing together directors and executives from the most relevant cruise lines in the Spanish market, where they will review the evolution of the last two decades and future trends.
The event, which is open to tour operators, shipping agents and other stakeholders in the Galician tourism sector, will feature directors and executives from Royal Caribbean, MSC Cruises and Costa Cruises, as well as international business development managers from luxury cruise lines such as Silversea Cruises and Oceania Cruises, and the industry association CLIA, among others.
The Port of Vigo, together with Vigo Cruise Terminal, sponsors this event, in which they will be able to present their achievements and future prospects to managers and executives.
The Port of Vigo will receive more than 90 calls in 2022 with approximately 175,000 passengers, a significant increase compared to 2019, when 67 calls and 141,700 passengers were received, before the pandemic hit the industry hard.
The creator and editor of InfoCruceros, Félix González, originally a computer programmer, after taking his first cruise in 2000 and being impressed by the experience, founded InfoCruceros in 2002, the first website about cruises in Spanish and the first European website about cruises, with the aim of serving as a vehicle for transmitting experiences among cruisers.
“InfoCruceros has never been a blog, because in 2002 that concept was still being formed in the USA; it is a community of cruise passengers and a means of communication,” says González.
In these 20 years he has sailed on more than 68 cruises and visited another 60, last Saturday he returned from his latest cruise on the brand new Norwegian Prima, which was christened by international pop star Katy Perry in Reykjavik, Iceland.
In these two decades, the internet has evolved considerably, and InfoCruceros, with Félix González at the helm, has adapted to each change. “The arrival of Facebook around 2008 didn't change things much at first, but with the popularization of smartphones from 2012/13 onwards, people began spending all their free time online on the social network's app, so I started dedicating more time and resources to both Facebook and Twitter.” Something similar happened with the arrival of Instagram and the rise of YouTube.
InfoCruceros has a YouTube channel where it publishes in-depth reports on the interiors of the cruise ships it visits. “Before, I would go to a ship, take photos, and within two weeks publish a detailed photo report on InfoCruceros. Now, while I'm on a cruise, I have to post stories and reels on Instagram, photos on Facebook, short videos for YouTube, and even for TikTok. When I get back, I edit and publish a video on the YouTube channel and write articles for other media outlets. It's all much more complex.”
In its 20 years of existence, the InfoCruceros cruise community has driven changes that have transformed the cruise industry. In its forums, cruise passengers organized the first excursions independent of cruise lines, a practice now known as social buying, which would become a trend and give rise to specialized tour operators with international impact.
González also successfully organized the ExpoCruceros fair in the Port of Vigo in 2008 and in Malaga in 2009, in addition to having written several catalogs and courses on cruises for large travel agencies and articles for many other media outlets.
