PERTH: The key to more flexible itineraries and a longer Australian season for the new Ovation of the Seas may lie in the regional ports outside of Sydney.
With Sydney Harbour’s cruise terminals booked out for years, Royal Caribbean Cruises is looking to the next nearest ports — Wollongong to the south and Newcastle to the north — for solutions.
“The thinking is, if we moved our smallest ship, Radiance of the Seas, to Wollongong for a few turnarounds, would that allow us to extend our Ovation season? It’s doable,” regional vice president Asia Pacific, Gavin Smith, told Cruise Critic.
Ovation of the Seas, which will be the newest and biggest ship to ever visit Australia, has four sailings from Sydney scheduled between December 2016 and January 2017, with hopes it will return the following summer for a longer season. Meanwhile, in October 2016, Radiance of the Seas is set to be the first cruise ship to call at Wollongong.
Wollongong’s industrial Port Kembla is also heating up as a potential new turnaround port — where cruises start and finish — with Smith saying the decision is “driven by the capacity to provide shelter for passenger processing”.
He said Port Kembla has “sheds of football field proportions that could easily accommodate baggage and border control, so we haven’t got to build anything” and it “ticks all the boxes” in marine, road and bus infrastructure. “If people can overcome the emotion of an industrial harbour, I can see no downsides.”
Smith pointed to other world-class cities whose main cruise terminals are more than an hour’s drive from the city centre: London, Rome, Los Angeles, New York. “It’s not unusual to have a port an hour from an airport, so I see no problem with bringing people by bus from Sydney Airport to Wollongong.”
As a port of call, Wollongong would also allow the flexibility to have a day on land rather than a day at sea when cruises head home to Sydney. “If Sydney is booked out on the day we want to go back, Wollongong gives us the opportunity to extend the cruise by a day but still have a port of call,” he explained.
Smith hinted that the line’s other ships may visit the city when he revealed that simulations of arrivals and departures of Voyager of the Seas were recently conducted at a marine college in Launceston. But it could be a couple of years before the next Royal ship sails into ‘the Gong’.
“We won’t be calling in 2016-17 but we will call again in 2017-18. If we can negotiate an extension to Ovation in early 2018, that might mean it will happen then, but it is more likely to be late 2018,” Smith said.
The company has also been considering Newcastle as an alternative to the congestion at Sydney, he added. “It’s just that little bit further away, but not beyond the realm of possibility.”
