San Diego launches cruise season — minus fewer calls from Disney

San Diego’s financially lucrative cruise industry launched its fall-to-spring season this week and is on track to see passenger volumes on par with those of a few years ago, just before the pandemic shut down ocean travel overnight.

“Every time a vessel starts and ends its voyage here in San Diego, that’s a $2 million impact to our regional economy. If they just call on San Diego, that’s about a $600,000 impact,” he said Monday during a news conference with Holland America’s Volendam docked just behind him at the B Street Terminal. The ship was scheduled to depart Monday for a 51-day roundtrip voyage to the South Pacific, including Hawaii and Fiji.

While cruise business here has ramped up quickly following a pandemic that led to a more than year-long shutdown of all voyages to Mexico, Hawaii and other destinations, San Diego is losing some of the boom in business it gained last year. “So we’ll have the Disney Magic here this fall and Disney Wonder back this spring but they’re going to continue with the Australia market. My read on the market is that as Disney adds more vessels to their fleet, they will expand in San Diego but it’s not going to be overnight. It may take a couple of years to get back to that level they had given us last year.”

“Back last season, the world wasn’t completely open from the pandemic so the Port of San Diego is a port that the cruise lines can rely on as a safe harbor, and we’re also a place to go when they have vessels and they need to do business,” Deaton explained. “So their vessel in Japan, the Diamond Princess, chose San Diego to do its home ports for last season and normally would have been in Yokohama, so now it’s back in Yokohama because Japan has fully reopened.

Something new for the cruise line next year will be two April cruises along the Mexico coast, tailored for full viewing of the first total solar eclipse in North America in seven years. Both will leave from San Diego, one for 22 days and the other for 14 days.

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