Albany businesses prepare for welcome financial boost with large cruise ships set to return in October

Albany business owners are preparing for the return of cruise ship passengers and the spending that comes with them more than 2.5 years after Australia shut the door on cruises to limit the spread of COVID-19. From October 1, big cruise ships will be able to visit WA ports for the first time since the ban brought the industry to a standstill in Australia in March 2020. The ban was lifted by the Federal Government on April 17 this year, and since then small cruise ships with a maximum of 350 people have been allowed in WA. The lifting of capacity limits from October will have cruise ships return to Albany, with Coral Princess, due to arrive on October 30 with 2265 passengers on board and 778 crew, the first. Coral Princess made headlines last week after more than 100 passengers and crew tested positive to the virus as it toured Australia’s east coast. Southern Ports chief executive Steve Lewis said the return of cruise ships to Albany would be “very uplifting for the town”. He said Albany usually received about 16 cruises a year and there were already 13 booked to arrive from October to April. “We’re very confident that with Tourism WA and the local community and the City of Albany, we will continue to see increases in cruise shipping,” he said. “The season runs from October to April roughly for cruising, and I would hope that we would start to see and even go beyond the cruise shipping we’ve had and over the next few years start to see maybe up to 30 vessels coming to Albany. “But we’ll see how it unfolds . . . I think we can be very encouraged just by the immediate bounce-back of 13 cruise ships.” Mr Lewis said COVID protocols established between State and Federal governments would apply to all cruise ships arriving in Albany, including a Department of Health requirement for a COVID management plan. “Any time you put a group of people together anywhere, there’s always the potential for COVID,” he said. “The Federal and the State governments have had a good opportunity over the last couple of months to look at all that, and they agreed that shipping can come back to Australia from October 1, on the larger vessels. “And I think we’ve got a lot of protocol as a State, a lot of understanding nationally, and it’s really up to the cruise ships too as to how they manage this.” Before the pandemic, 106 cruise ships visited WA in the 2019-2020 season, injecting $261.9 million into the State’s economy. When a big cruise ship arrives in Albany, foot traffic surges in the CBD as visitors look to experience the city, sample local produce or buy something to take home. Albany’s Historic Whaling Station general manager Elise van Gorp said the last group of cruise ship visitors to the station arrived in mid-March 2020. “Within a couple days, we had to close down as a Federal Government order and that’s when we all went into lockdown, basically from that time,” she said. “The cruise ship season leading up to that point was really good, we’d seen a lot of growth in that cruise ship season.” Ms van Gorp said she had already received tour bookings for the upcoming cruise season. “We’re really pleased that we can start to welcome back more of a range of visitors that we haven’t been able to see here for quite some time,” she said. At York Street souvenir shop Wombat Lodge, owners Helen and George Burcher said the return of cruise ships would be a welcome boost for their business. The Burchers opened their Albany shop in 1974. They have another shop in Bunbury and they used to have one in Perth’s CBD, until they closed it because of the impacts of the pandemic. Cruise ships would usually “double or triple” their daily sales, they said. “We’ve got the products that they want, and they enjoy them and off they go, and they’re great for the town,” Ms Burcher said. “Our locals are our bread and butter and any extras are the cream and helps us along.” Busy Blue Bus Tours owner Susan McCabe said before the pandemic, her business would sell tours to cruise ship passengers and operate a hop-on, hop-off bus service. Ms McCabe said she already had some tours booked for cruise ship travellers from October, but she warned that it could take time for cruise ship tourism in Albany to return to pre-pandemic levels. “(It is) unlikely that in the next six months the number of customers and the spend of those customers will reach pre-COVID levels,” she said. “It’s a natural progression of really turning the wheel all over again from a cold start.” Speaking about the lifting of the ban on cruise ships in April, WA Premier Mark McGowan said he understood that many West Australians would be apprehensive about their return. “I want to make it clear that the resumption is being managed in a safe, staged and responsible manner with important protocols and safeguards,” Mr McGowan said in April. “WA’s world-leading vaccination rate is one of the very reasons we can see the safe return of cruise shipping. “We have successfully managed cruise ships before, and together with the latest safety guidelines and approach we can do this again. “This is about ensuring people can safely resume cruising and WA businesses ... can do business and support WA jobs.”