Cancun, QRoo.- Cozumel captured a total of 98 cruises during November alone, with which has already added 239 boats captured since June of this year in which the arrival of ocean liners was reactivated, according to the statistical portal of the Comprehensive Port Administration of Quintana Roo (Apiqroo).
Between December 1 and 8, it has already scheduled 30 more arrivals, with which it will add 269 berths and will get closer and closer to the goal of 400 ships by the end of 2021, which is the projection made by the island’s municipal authorities .
This after in June of this year Cozumel resumed the reception of cruises with only 4 ships, increasing the following month with 14 and already by August it reported 29 arrivals. During September it increased again to 41 ships, and in October it closed with 53, plus the 98 for the whole of November.
The sustained growth of the island is due to the normalization of arrivals of the five main shipping companies that docked on the island since before the pandemic (Norwegian Cruise Line, Carnival Cruise Line, Royal Caribbean, MSC and Disney Cruise Line), in addition to the incorporation of new ones such as the British Virgin Voyages, subsidiary of the airline Virgin Atlantic, with its cruise ship Sacarlet Lady with capacity for 2,770 passengers and 1,160 crew members, for which a pre-Hispanic cultural welcome was presented.
Apiqroo’s statistical portal establishes that as of October Cozumel has captured a total of 228,465 passengers, not counting the crew, that is, an average of 1,700 passengers per ship, almost half of what they regularly mobilized before the pandemic. and of the sanitary restrictions to which it obliged.
The head of dispatch of the State Tourism Secretariat, Andrés Aguilar Becerril, assured that the economic benefit at the end of August for the island already exceeded two million dollars, with a total of 76,890 passengers until August and 142,685 at the end of September, Until now, the data has not been updated at the end of November.
Previously, the former municipal president of Cozumel, Pedro Joaquín Delbouis, assured that they will close the year with an approximate of 400 floating hotels, since in the remainder of 2021 more shipping lines will continue to incorporate ships to the island.
Cozumel nationwide
In 2019, the island also known as Isla de las Golondrinas closed with 4.5 million cruise passengers; This volume of travelers represented just over half of the 8.9 million tourists that came that year to the rest of the 27 ports throughout the country that also receive cruises.
While the ports of Ensenada, San Carlos, Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Pichilingüe, Puerto Escondido, Loreto, Santa Rosalía, Guaymas, Topolobambo, Mazatlán, Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo, Zihuatanejo, Acapulco, Huatulco and Puerto Chiapas received as a whole 950 Ships throughout 2019, 1,366 ships docked in Cozumel, which means that the island captured 416 more cruise ships than the entire Pacific region of the country.
In addition, Cozumel closed 2020 with 1.1 million passengers received, that is, 3.4 million less than the 4.5 million that the island captured in 2019, according to the statistical report of the Ministry of Communications and Transportation (SCT).
Mahahual, the other cruise port in the south of Quintana Roo and the second in importance at the national level, closed 2020 with 455,179 passengers; 1.1 million travelers stopped visiting it, taking into account that in 2019 the pier attracted 1.4 million cruise tourists.
Both ports stopped attracting 4 million 587,008 tourists during 2020.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx