By Wang Jin

Usher in golden decade for China cruises

By Wang Jin

"In the future ten years, China cruise industry enters its golden development decade and will be in a rapid development stage of industrial chain architecture and market segmentation." At the 3rd China Maritime Finance (Dongjiang) International Forum, Zheng Weihang, executive vicepresident of the Chinese Transport Association's Cruise Ship Branch, held that Chinese cruise economy has grown out of nothing and obtained exciting achievements in the past decade. However, many development bottlenecks have become prominent, only by facing up to and trying to solve these problems, can advent of the Chinese cruise tourism golden age be accelerated.

According to Zheng Weihang, flying to Hong Kong or Singapore was the general practice of the Chinese mainland tourism outbound cruise tourism before 2016. One cruise ship of 900 rated seats was in service on Chinese home port route in 2006. In July 2006, Costa Cruises, Royal Caribbean Cruises and Star Cruises opened cruise routes with Shanghai, Tianjin and Sanya as home ports, mainland tourists are now able to go to sea by cruise ship in China, and routes are mainly distributed in Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia.

According to statistics of the Chinese Transport Association's Cruise Ship Branch, Chinese 11 major port cities received 1040 cruise ships in 2016, an increase of 61% year-on-year (YOY), including 927 home port voyages, up 72% YOY; 83 access voyages, down 8%.

The 11 port cities received 4,567,370 Chinese and foreign cruise tourists for exit and entry (84% YOY), including 4,289,780 Chinese-dominated home port voyage tourists for exit and entry (93% YOY), while 277,590 overseas-dominated access voyage tourists for exit and entry (up 8% YOY).

In the first quarter of this year, there were more than 1 million exit and entry tourists by cruise ships in 11 ports. Shanghai and Tianjin ranked first two slots for exit and entry tourists by cruise ships. It's worth noting that Guangzhou as a dark horse reported 115,000 exit and entry tourists by cruise ships in the first quarter.

Cruise economy is drawing an increasing attention of the country and localities. Since 2009, 13 State Council documents have expressly vowed to support development of the emerging cruise ship industry. In 2015 Shanghai, Tianjin, Fujian and Hainan launched policies and opinions on boosting development of cruise economy. Driven by the policies, seven cities of Shanghai, Tianjin, Sanya, Xiamen, Zhoushan, Qingdao and Shenzhen have built eight international cruise terminals, cruise terminals in Haikou, Guangzhou and Dalian are under