Vancouver's convenient little sideline business as "that place you stop at on the way to an Alaskan cruise" is going to be losing significant volume in the near future.
Holland America and Princess Cruises announced yesterday that each of them will be deploying one ship from Alaska to Europe for 2011. This in addition to cuts that four other cruise lines had already announced, resulting in a total annual reduction of close to 170,000 cruise visitors to the state by the time all is said and done.
An article in the Anchorage Daily News states that the cruise lines are blaming the cuts on new Alaskan taxes voted in in 2006. Whereas Alaskan tourism sources are skeptical, saying that passengers have been ok with paying the taxes and perhaps the cruise lines aren't being totally up front with their explanations.
Regardless, this situation is going to have repercussions for Vancouver. As in: when a substantial amount of your tourism is based on being "someplace on the way to another place", you really have minimal control over that part of your industry.
Over the past 35 years, B.C. has been one of the world leaders in terms of marketing its natural attributes to the worldwide tourism industry. However, we can be reasonably sure that much of the world has now caught up to B.C. in that regard and, in some cases, passed it.
Time now to create some new attributes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment