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Cruise business sails back

"Instead of getting some of the people to the ships, we are now trying to bring some of the ships to the people."

Giora Israel, a vice president at Carnival

New York's late sleepers will dream right through it. But Saturday morning, as on most weekend days this month and next, four cruise ships are expected to dock within an hour of one another at piers along the Hudson River, depositing thousands of seafarers with sunburns, palm-tree-print shirts and rhinestone-encrusted flip-flops just off the West Side Highway.

The city's cruise ship business, after being dealt a blow last Sept. 11, has rebounded. Industry officials said the number of passengers traveling through the port this year is expected to edge above the number who sailed in or out of New York in 2000, and they are predicting that next year will be even stronger.

"Everybody was sweating bullets to think of what would happen this year," said Arthur J. Boyle, general manager of the passenger ship terminal, a concrete complex of bridges, buildings and piers off the Hudson River, from 46th to 54th Streets. "It came right back."

These days, the terminal is a world away from the emergency command center it was converted into after Sept. 11. In fact, on the busiest days, it looks a bit like a mall on Christmas Eve.

Outside, Shaukat Jivanjee, 42, waited behind the wheel of one of the taxis lined up outside. "It's a gold mine," he said.

More than 90 percent of cruises leaving from New York go to New England, Canada, Bermuda, or simply out to sea, Boyle said. And about 75 percent of the people who take them, he estimated, live within a four-hour drive of the port.

Molly McPherson, a spokeswoman for the International Council of Cruise Lines, a trade group, agreed. "New York is primarily a drive-up market for cruises, as opposed to Florida, which most people fly to," she said.

Sunday at the pier, Ellen Pufahl, 45, from Kings Park, New York, on Long Island, echoed a sentiment heard among many cruisers that day.

"I don't like flying," she said, as she and her husband stood in a small crowd, guarding bags whose contents included the eight pairs of shoes she had packed for a seven-day cruise to Bermuda, not including the sparkling flip-flops she wore.

Even before Sept. 11, cruise operators said, they had begun to add departures at a variety of ports around the country, including Charleston, South Carolina, Philadelphia and New York. And if some potential passengers preferred to avoid a trip to the airport before Sept. 11, that desire has only crystallized since then, particularly in the Northeast.

"Instead of getting some of the people to the ships, we are now trying to bring some of the ships to the people," said Giora Israel, vice president for strategic planning at Carnival Corp, the country's largest cruise operator. "We see that the tri-state area represents a tremendous growth possibility for cruising."

Next spring, the 2,124-passenger Carnival Legend will offer eight-day cruises from New York to the Caribbean, and the 2,224-passenger Norwegian Dawn, Norwegian Cruise Line's newest ship, will also leave regularly from New York for the Bahamas.

For two cruise lines to place new ships in New York for Caribbean and Bahamas runs would have been unthinkable a year ago, said Mike Driscoll, editor of Cruise Week, a trade newsletter. "The reason they're doing this is because of the whole flying mess," he said. "Some people are afraid to fly, some just consider it too much of a hassle."

By the end of this year, P&O Ports North America, which runs the Hudson River terminal under an agreement with the city's Economic Development Corp., expects that 230 cruises will have departed from New York, with passenger traffic at 630,000. That figure is slightly higher than two years ago, when 239 cruises left.

Next year, passenger traffic at the terminal is expected to exceed 750,000 people, Boyle estimated, thanks in part to the new ships. And in 2004, Cunard Line, also owned by Carnival, is expected to introduce the 2,620-passenger Queen Mary 2, which will be the world's largest ocean liner and will assume the trans-Atlantic route traveled by the Queen Elizabeth 2, from New York to Southampton, England.

The cruise lines would like to see the passenger ship terminal refurbished and expanded. The major cruise lines, together with P&O Ports, paid for a study projecting that by 2010, passenger traffic at the terminal will nearly double.
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