The Port of Bilbao prepares the arrival of cruise ships for September
The Bilbao Port Authority designs a sanitary-security protocol at the Getxo maritime terminal that will be complemented with the one that the shipowners impose on their ships. Juan Lazkano
Since November 1, 2019, when the German cruise ship AidaSol docked with 2,216 tourists on board, the docks of the Port of Bilbao in Getxo have been orphaned by pleasure boats . The coronavirus pandemic and its consequences paralyzed a sector that has been fallow for a whole year but is already preparing its return to sea. The Bilbao Port Authority (APB) "is working to attend the first cruise ships in September, if everything goes according to plan and the health situation allows it," the director of Operations, Commercial and Logistics of the Port Authority, Andima Ormaetxe.
According to the forecasts managed by the APB Cruise Unit, there will be thirty leisure boats that will arrive at the maritime terminal located in the Getxo docks, including some during next December, something unprecedented since the usual cruise season usually ends by the end of October.
Gloria Frau, head of the Cruise Unit, specifies that "right now the situation is one of uncertainty, but we have everything ready for when the ships arrive", some cruise ships that the same shipowners try to ensure are authentic floating fortresses against the covid- 19 caused by the coronavirus.
Shipping companies have established their own safety regulations on board, specific for each ship, based on a joint regulation coordinated by the CLIA, an acronym in English for the International Association of Cruise Shipowners.
In addition to requiring a negative covid test before boarding, cruise ships have limited capacity on their first trips based on health restrictions, create bubble groups on each voyage, which remain on land or withdraw services where they are crowds the passage as the self-service areas at lunchtime, among other initiatives.
Ormaetxe indicates, to highlight the established requirements, that "there have already been cases where a passenger has left their bubble group at their own risk and has not been allowed to board afterwards." Frau adds that "never before have so many security measures been taken to travel by cruise." The reason, according to Ormaetxe, is that "a shipowner cannot risk that a ship has an outbreak that affects the entire passage. It is not possible to generate a fear of cruise ships, that is why the protocols that are self-imposed, and require the ports, it is very high."
The cruise ship facilities of the Port of Bilbao will be at that rigorous height. The maritime station, baptized as Olatua, is one of the advantages available to the APB when shipping companies choose one port or another when they plan their stopovers. For this reason, it prepares to attend to passengers with itineraries marked on the floor, sanitary rooms and takes the temperature of everyone who disembarks. "As a port, and as the entrance to the Basque Country for cruise passengers, we are going to collaborate so that the entire operation works", specifies the head of the Cruises Unit of the Biscayan network.
Whether the reservations for cruise stops already awarded for this year in Getxo are fulfilled will depend on the degree of vaccination that has been achieved after August "because the rest of the conditions are already in place," says the port official. "The shipping companies prefer to have the boat sailing with little passage than to have it moored, we are looking forward to them coming and there is a desire to travel, which will be incentivized with lower prices," he points out.
In this desire to be welcomed, the port works with the tourism entities of Getxo, Bilbao, Bizkaia and Euskadi to facilitate disembarkation and subsequent visits as much as possible with all the required protection against the pandemic.
"Giving confidence is very important so that the reactivation of the sector is a fact and all the actors are working on it", points out Frau. The Director of Operations is ambitious and assures that "the aspiration is that, after the pandemic, we grow in scales. The inertia that we brought before is not going to stop." And he says it with knowledge of the facts in a sector that works well in advance on the design and sale of its routes and berths to customers, "sometimes up to two years from now," he quantifies.
That is why after the downturn that led to losing the almost eighty stopovers scheduled for last year - which was to be a record year after the 53 cruises in 2019 - the forecasts for next year advance optimism. Frau indicates that "we will not reach last year's reserves, but we will far exceed the activity we had in 2019." All this as long as the pandemic generated by the expansion of the coronavirus does not continue to mark global activity.
