Baltimore will become a year-round cruise port when behemoth Carnival Cruise Lines begins weekly sailings that it expects will handle 115,000 passengers annually, beginning in September 2009.
Miami-based Carnival Corp., the world's largest cruise line, said yesterday that the 2,124-passenger Carnival Pride will offer a pair of seven-day itineraries to such destinations as the Turks and Caicos islands, the Bahamas and Florida, through August 2011. It will be the northernmost port where Carnival offers year-round cruises.
State officials hailed Carnival's announcement as a boon to Maryland's cruise industry, which blossomed after the Sept. 11 attacks but has been losing steam since 2004. Carnival as well as Celebrity Cruises and Norwegian Cruise Lines had dropped sailings from Baltimore after that peak year.
"We've been chasing them ever since they left in 2004," said James J. White, the Maryland Port Administration's executive director.
"We stay in front of the cruise lines big and small trying to get their economic impact for the state of Maryland," White said. "The cruise lines are finally responding again to the huge population and the high median household income here."
The nearly 60,000 passengers that took cruises from Baltimore in 2006 generated $56 million in economic impact for the state, the port administration estimated.
After more than a year of hard negotiating, Carnival agreed to launch weekly cruises from Baltimore in exchange for enhancements the state pledged to make to its $13 million South Locust Point passenger terminal, a converted paper shed that opened in 2006, White said. A bad-weather metal canopy is to be built between the parking lot and terminal, he said.
When Baltimore again has three cruise lines in 2009, the 60,000-square-foot South Locust Point terminal will likely need to be expanded, he said.
After a four-year hiatus, Norwegian returns to Baltimore on June 21 with the launch of 11 seven-night cruises to Bermuda. Royal Caribbean International, the port's only operator last year, cut its 2008 Baltimore sailings to 16, half of what it had in 2007.
As airlines cut capacity and raise fares because of sky-high fuel prices, Baltimore became more attractive to Carnival given the 40 million people that live within a six-hour drive from the city, Carnival spokeswoman Jennifer De La Cruz said.
