Xiamen received 324,800 cruise guests last year, making it one of the key ports in mainland China.

“Five years ago, we had only one or two cruise ships visiting Xiamen every month,” said Hai Lin Zhong, Deputy Director-General of the Xiamen Culture and Tourism Bureau.

“Now we have at least two cruise ships visiting every week,” he said.

The city doubled its cruise guest number year over year, posting 161,800 guests in 2017 and reporting over 324,000 last year.

“The number of guests in 2018 is almost 5.7 times the number of passengers we had in 2014,” Zhong noted.

“More and more people wanted to travel and also do cruises,” he continued, adding that Xiamen was a well-known vacation destination in China.

Currently most of the cruise passengers that arrive in Xiamen are Chinese, but the city plans to attract more foreigners.

“The city has a convenient geographic location, in the middle of East Asia,” Zhong said. 

To reach that goal, Zhong highlighted the Asia Cruise Cooperation’s strategy in promoting Xiamen and the other destinations.

“They play a very important hole in our cruise market,” he added. “We are also continuously enhancing the facilities and our cruise terminal.”

An expansion on the city’s cruise berth was opened this year and now is extended, able to receive any class of cruise ship.

Another major project is the Cruise City Seaworld, which will be an area including hotels, a shopping mall and other facilities, set to open in 2022.

For 2019, the city is expecting more than 100 cruise ship arrivals and the number of cruise passengers is going to grow again, according to Zhong.

Later this year a new cruise line is expected to operate from Xiamen, sailing regular cruises with the former Oriana, which will be renamed Piano Land.