France: cruises resume in Marseille after more than a year of stoppage
This Sunday, July 4, the SeaSide and the Costa Smeralda (on the photo) will leave the port of Marseille after more than a year of stoppage.
REUTERS / Guglielmo Mangiapane
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
After Greece, cruises resume in France.
Two behemoths of the seas, over 320 meters long - more than 3 football pitches each - are leaving this Sunday, July 4 from the port of Marseille, the number one cruise port in France.
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Last Sunday, a ship of the Italian-Swiss company MSC left for a test cruise.
It had 339 passengers on board, while the boat can accommodate 5,000. It was the first step in a recovery that began on June 30 in France.
But this time the two ships, Costa Smeralda from Costa Cruises and Seaside from MSC Cruises, - the two leaders in the sector in Europe - are back to sea for good.
A gradual start-up with thirty-seven stopovers in July and August and a few thousand passengers.
Very far from the 2 million per year, before the health crisis.
These ships must have wandered from port to port, because of the
bans on docking
for fear of the coronavirus.
The sector had lost nearly a million euros in France in a few months, while it had been growing steadily for twenty years.
Globally, cruises have grown from 19 million passengers in 2010 to 30 million in 2020. A craze that raised up to $ 150 billion and gave work to more than a million people in 2018, according to the Association. International Cruise Line (CLIA).
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To read also: Coronavirus: the cruise sector is undergoing an unprecedented crisis
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