2013 Cruise ship season arrives with one more sunrise

Saturday marks the beginning of Prince Rupert's 2013 Cruise season, a four month window to showcase the region and entice the floating hotels to make Prince Rupert a permanent port of call into the future.

With our neighbours to the North in Ketchikan, the gold standard of sorts for the cruise industry in the Northwest, the pursuit of those cruise lines, their passengers and the impact that they can have on tourism is one of a fairly competitive rather nature.

The Northwest and Canada Cruise association, provided an instructive review of that impact with a study released earlier this year, which highlights the volume of passengers and potential dollar value that the industry provides to British Columbia each year.

As we outlined on the blog earlier this year, this years visits show a slight increase from the totals of last year, offering the Prince Rupert Cruise Task Force and the Port an opportunity to continue to build on their community success of recent years in rebuilding Prince Rupert's footprint with the industry.

This year's efforts begin on Saturday, with the debut vessel for 2013 season, the Oceania Lines ship MS Regatta calling at Northland Cruise Terminal.

It will be the first of three visits for the large ship, which holds close to 700 passengers, in addition to it's Saturday arrival, the Regatta will make return visits on July 3rd and 10th.

To give North Coast residents a taste of the exotic nature of the Oceania, we have a few items of note below, a tour of sorts to the atmosphere of the vessel that arrives on our horizon in the morning.

Explore Regatta

MS Regatta

Frommer's Regatta review


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. Saturday's port call from the MS Regatta marks day one of the new season, the final port call arriving on September 23rd, when the largest of this years vessels, The Celebrity Century arrives in port.

The full schedule for 2013 from the Prince Rupert Port Authority can be found here.

The Northern View had this item outlining the anticipation for the 2013 season.

CFTK featured two items of note on the start of the Cruise Ship season this one and this one of preview, while the Northern View offered up this account of the MS Regatta's arrival on Saturday morning.

Another update from the Northern View on the visit of the MS Regatta and the launch of the cruise season can be found here.

Our Archive of Cruise related developments can be found here.