A modest initiative more than a decade ago to attract more and more cruise vessels to Kochi has started yielding results now.
Way back in 2001, when the first cruise liner called at Kochi port, the port authorities had laid a good deal of emphasis on providing personal services to those on board. The effort has not been in vain. Today, Kochi is the focus of cruise tourism in India. This has been possible because the port has set new benchmark in providing highly professional services for the country’s other ports to follow.
The initiative included a setting up of a dedicated cruise cell offering single window clearance in presence of the officials of the port, Customs, Immigration and CISF on the one hand and the tourism department, tour operators, vessel agents, stevedores providing labour pool and the taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers, on the other.
No wonder, Kochi has emerged as the country’s most-preferred cruise destination.
To cap it all, the seamless integration of all the Government agencies has been singularly responsible for facilitating novel cruise tourism such as Fly-Cruise-Fly, turnaround operation as well as home porting of cruise vessels at Kochi.
Cruise calls
C. Unnikrishnan Nair, Traffic Manager, Kochi Port Trust, said that the port was virtually in festive mood on hosting nearly 5,000 guests on board German cruise liner, AIDA Diva, which visited Kochi in the last week of November, the third such visit in three years. This was perhaps the highest single aggregation of foreign tourists at any destination for three days.
There has been a steady rise in cruise calls at Kochi — from 36 in 2008-09 to 44 in 2011-12 — and consequently the number of tourists also jumped from 19,264 to 37,201 during the period. The projection is that the number of cruise calls this fiscal will rise to 50. In 2011, state’s coffers became richer by Rs 60 crore thanks to increased earnings from cruise tourism.
Normally cruise operators look for a port which also has a good international airport. Another important factor is the availability of locations of tourist interests, which Kochi can boast of. They also look for efficient customs and immigration clearance systems. All these factors have helped Kochi, he observed.
The port, he pointed out, has hosted six turnarounds of three cruise ships of the AIDA Cruises till date, involving a minimum of 2,500 tourists in each call. The first turnaround was for AIDA Cara in October 2009 and this was followed by two for AIDA Aura (October 2010 and April 2011) and three turnaround operations for AIDA Diva (November 2011, March 2012 and November 2012).
Fillip to tourism
The advantage of turnaround is that they bring in double the number of passengers who can be accommodated in them — those disembarking it and other who embark it afresh. This, in turn, provide added fillip to tourism trade in the region.
The representatives of the management of AIDA Cruises and the crew highly appreciated the cruise facilitation centre and the facilities made available to them. In fact, the cruise facilitation centre has helped them to significantly bring down the turnaround cost as compared to their previous turnaround operations, when they had to set up temporary shamians /tents, he said.
This year Kochi Port hosted AIDA Diva at the newly build cruise facilitation centre, built with the financial support from the Union Tourism Ministry and Kerala Tourism. The facility, set up on 1,600 sq mt area, is fully air-conditioned, with all modern amenities, such as duty-free shops, cafeteria/souvenir shops, customs and immigration clearance facilities and X-ray scanning machines for baggage of embarking and disembarking passengers, among others.
A total of 1,466 disembarkations were smoothly handled. At the last count on November 27, a total of 1,862 tourists had embarked for the fresh sojourn beginning on the next day.
The port put into service the brand new X-ray scanning machine, which facilitated in scanning of over 4,000 baggage of the disembarking and embarking tourists.
With the addition of one more X-ray scanner in the cruise terminal there would be three baggage scanners, including the existing scanning machine provided by the customs.
AIDA Diva will call at Kochi again in March 2013 for the next turnaround.