The Brazilian government wants to boost its cruise business after years of decline that recently saw the market dip to 2007 levels, according to the 2017-2018 Cruise Industry News Annual Report.
Local authorities are finally ready to pull the trigger on long-awaited cruise measures.
“The cruise market has the potential to leverage our country’s tourism,” said Brazilian Minister of Tourism, Marx Beltrão, during a meeting with industry representatives and authorities.
“Our goal is to have 40,000 additional cruise passengers on the next season,” he added, noting that this would generate jobs and inject money in the country’s issue.
Among the news will be the new MSC Seaview, which will homeport in Brazil for the 2018-2019 cruise season.
Speaking to Cruise Industry News, Beltrão explained how he planned to change the cruise scenario in the country.
“We will do our ‘homework’ in order to drop operational cost for the cruise lines and improve our infrastructure,” he explained highlighting the work of the Ministry of Transport, which oversees the country’s ports.
Among the planed measures, the minister pointed out his team’s work to give the cruise line’s what he calls, “legal certainty.”
The goal is to allow the cruise lines to use the international labor standards when hiring their Brazilian crew.
Another planned measure to reduce pilot costs.
“The pilot service here in Brazil can cost four times more than in other parts of the world,” Beltrão said. “We are in an advanced stages of negotiations with them to change it.”
One more plan is to create additional infrastructure with new cruise terminals, as well as dredging various berths in the country.
Meanwhile, cruise terminals built for the 2014 Soccer World Cup, hosted by Brazil, are going through bidding processes and will be soon run by private sector companies.
“With those actions, we want to make the cruise lines look at us while planning their future deployment. In the next five years, the idea is to have 40 ships. In the near future, we believe that the country can became the third biggest cruise market in the world,” Beltrão concluded.
