ALL ABOARD - cruises out of Mobile
Mar 3rd, 2002
By ANGIE DROBNICMobile Register Business Reporter
A little over a decade ago, cruises out of Mobile would have seemed far-fetched. Downtown was boarded up. Florida had a lock on cruises. And how many people would want to go anyway? Today, Mobile's downtown is bustling, the cruise industry has ballooned, and cruise lines are scouting Gulf Coast cities. It seems Mobile's day in the sun is finally here, as evidenced by the month of cruises Carnival Cruise Lines started Saturday.
But does Mobile have a real shot at winning permanent status as a homeport, where cruise ships depart on their way out to the Caribbean?
"The answer is yes, and the cruise lines will tell you the same thing," said Lori Baer of Gee and Jenson, a cruise industry consultant.
"The cruise lines are actively seeking new partners for places to put their ships," said Baer, who has monitored cruise opportunities along the Gulf Coast as part of consulting work she's done for the Mississippi State Port Authority in nearby Gulfport.
"There has been a shift in their thinking ... 'We've got all these new ships on line, why don't we bring these ships to the people?'"
Cruise lines are moving away from basing most cruises out of Florida and enticing travelers to fly in, agreed Jessica Agate, a New Jersey-based columnist for the consumer guide Cruise Reports.
"Everybody in the industry is looking for new ports. That's part of the competitive nature of the industry," she said.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have hastened cruise lines' search for more domestic homeports as they hurried to move ships from overseas back to the United States. But the underlying trend was there to begin with, she said.
The industry reacted aggressively, not only by moving ships but also slashing prices. Preliminary reports show consumers have responded, Agate said.
Bookings for some lines have been promising during January and February, an all-important window known in the industry as "wave period," when customers tend to buy cruises as major vacations for the upcoming year, Agate said.
"The major cruise lines are all reporting that their bookings are up. A few are even saying that they're doing better this time of year than last year," she said.
Testing the market:
Mobile Mayor Mike Dow, who has long championed Mobile as a cruise homeport, believes the time is right for Mobile to be placed on the cruise lines' map.
"I feel pretty strongly that the experiment we're putting in place in March is going to lead to the placement of a permanent cruise ship here," he said.
Al St. Clair, appointed by Dow as the city's director of waterfront, cruise development and special projects, said he thinks the city has a 50-50 chance of winning regular service by October.
In addition to Carnival, the city has briefed Holland America Line and Royal Caribbean on using Mobile as a homeport, St. Clair said.
Part of the city's optimism is based on how quickly the initial offering of Mobile cruises sold out. Less than 15 days after the first cruises were announced, Carnival and area travel agents had to deal with massive overbooking, particularly on the six-day cruise scheduled for March 9.
An additional five cruises were added to the first three. Customers were moved to the later cruises or in some cases to cruises departing from Florida or New Orleans.
Carnival would not provide specific numbers on the overbooking situation, but some travel agents believe overbookings from the March 9 cruise alone filled up the additional six-day cruises scheduled for March 17 and March 25.
"Carnival cannot walk away from this market until they've tested it," St. Clair said. "They haven't tested it yet. What they've got is the low-hanging fruit."
Travel agents said that the vast majority of the bookings on the Mobile cruises came from Mobile and Baldwin counties and Escambia County, Florida, all within an hour's driving time.
St. Clair and Brenda Scott of the Mobile Convention and Visitors Corp. have said that Mobile can pull travelers in from up to five hours away, including Birmingham and Atlanta.
The drive market may not be quite that broad, however: Carnival officials have said in industry publications that they consider three hours to be a more realistic drive time. But even given the shorter time frame, Mobile would still be untested if travelers have only been pulled from an hour away, city officials said.
Build it, and they will come:
If Mobile got a cruise commitment tomorrow, however, the city wouldn't exactly know where to put the ship.
The Alabama State Docks is hosting the Holiday for the month, but Docks director James Lyons said the Docks has no interest in hosting cruise ships on a permanent basis, preferring instead to keep its focus on cargo.
Dow said the city isn't sure where it would put a cruise ship or how it would develop a usable terminal.
"A lot of it depends on what the cruise industry intends to do, and then we'll have to make our case," he said.
"We'll do whatever we need to do to build one, because there's a lot of money to be made by doing that. We're going to have to spend a few dollars to make a few more," he said.
If Carnival were here on a regular basis, it would buy most of its supplies locally, though it is trucking in supplies from Miami for the March cruises, St. Clair said. And tourists who come for the cruises would eat in Mobile restaurants and visit Mobile attractions, Dow said.
Parking fees, which tend to be around $10 a day at cruise terminals, would help pay for a terminal, Dow said.
Right now, the city seems to have two options for where to dock the ships.
The first would be to use the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center.
But the convention center presents some problems as a cruise terminal that would have to be addressed first, St. Clair said.
The bulkhead there would have to be improved, he said, and there may be other navigation issues. The largest hurdle would be finding a way to screen luggage. Suitcases belonging to more than 1,000 passengers would have to be moved quickly between the convention center's three floors, and that would be difficult, St. Clair said.
The second option would be to have cruise ships dock at a parcel of land owned by the city just south of Cooper Riverside Park. The city is in the process of getting the land bulkheaded, in anticipation of tall ships that will stop here in July for the city's Tricentennial.
Long-term plans for the land include a maritime museum, a visitor's center and a ferry terminal to be used for commuter traffic between Mobile and Baldwin counties.
An interim cruise terminal might also be placed on the land there while the city evaluates options, St. Clair said.
All around the Gulf:
Meanwhile, nearby Gulfport has been furiously courting cruise lines, promising to build a terminal with money from casinos that lease port land. Consultants for Gulfport have estimated that an interim terminal would cost about $2 million, while a large, permanent facility could cost as much as $18 million, and officials there have said they're willing to spend the money on such a project.
"If they want to put in a facility, it's going to be easier for them to do it than for (Mobile)," St. Clair said.
But Mobile has been courting the cruise lines longer and won a trial run of cruises first, he said.
Not that it's a case of either-or. Scott of the Mobile Convention and Visitors Corp. believes that both Mobile and Gulfport can become home to cruise ships.
"As (cruise lines) come out with more ships and greater demand from the drive-in market, I believe there's room for everybody," she said earlier this month.
Baer, the consultant who has worked for Gulfport, said she too believes Mobile and Gulfport might both win cruise ships.
Along the east coast, cruise lines move ships every month or two to a nearby port, hitting several cities during a season. That kind of scenario might play out on the Gulf Coast as well, she said.
"There's always competition, there's no doubt about that. But going to one place doesn't necessarily mean another place will be excluded," she said.