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According to Mandy Chan, manager of cruise services for the Port there will 325 cruise calls beginning in April.
At one point last year, there was genuine concern among port managers and tourist officials in Canada that cruise ships would skip Canada this year on the way to Alaska.
This concern arose after the U.S. Congress passed temporary legislation allowing foreign-flagged cruise ships to sail from the U.S. and return to the U.S. without visiting a foreign country. That legislation was necessary after health authorities forbid cruise ships from entering Canadian waters during the Covid crisis.
Now, according to Mandy Chan, manager of cruise services for the Port of Vancouver, it is looking like it will be business as usual this season in Canada.
She told Cruise Industry News, “When Transport Canada announced in mid-July that we were going to open up again in 2022, that was a very good signal and allowed our organization to start getting the terminals ready again.
“Right now, we are doing a lot of work on the infrastructure.
We are replacing some of our old bollards to handle bigger vessels. The piles under the docks are also being upgraded with cathodic wrappings around them. We are also just about to remove a wall in the terminal to create more footprint for our passengers inside.”
Chan said, “We have about 325 calls scheduled, of which approximately 90 percent are homeport calls. This could mean 1.3 million passengers."