Marseilles (AFP)
Two liners from MSC Cruises and Costa Cruises on Sunday embarked thousands of passengers in the port of Marseille, the first French stopover in several months for a very supervised recovery, the companies announced.
"It is a very beautiful feeling of joy, we are very confident", assured AFP Patrick Pourbaix, general manager of MSC Cruises France.
1,200 passengers left Marseille aboard MSC's Seaside at the end of the afternoon.
Mr. Pourbaix said he was very confident about the health protocol - which does not require the vaccination of passengers but several antigenic tests - since "we resumed in August 2020 in Italy, we embarked 70,000 passengers with this same protocol without any problem".
"What we have put in place for cruise ships goes well beyond what we can see on land," he insisted.
MSC has already carried out two test cruises departing from Marseille with only a few hundred passengers on board in June.
The protocol provides in particular for "bubble excursions" during which passengers make very supervised visits in groups of 35 people maximum.
"You can't get out of it freely, that's for sure," admitted Mr. Pourbaix, "but we get VIP tours in small groups."
The Seaside, which is making a 7-day Mediterranean cruise open for reservation only two months earlier, will be "at 50% of its capacity" only, against a maximum gauge of 70%, Mr. Pourbaix said.
With very low prices, half-empty boats and only 50% of the fleet in operation, "we cannot speak of profitability, but we are once again attracting people to cruising", he admitted.
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For its part, Costa Cruises (Carnival group) also welcomed in a press release the return to France of the Costa Smeralda.
The Covid-19 abruptly halted continued growth for 10 years in the sector, after a peak in 2019 at 29.7 million passengers worldwide, including 15.4 million North Americans and 7.7 million Europeans, according to a report by the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), the cruise line association.
© 2021 AFP