Valley officials mull cruise line prospects
Two dozen local officials gathered Tuesday morning in the Port of Brownsville Fire Station Training Room to hear two experienced cruise industry personnel talk about the possibility of a cruise ship for the area.
Charles Towsley, president of Marine Directions and Jay Lewis, executive director of Passenger & Shipping Institute, shared basic information about their industry.
Last June, Donna Eymard of the Port of Brownsville presented the idea to the South Padre Island Board of Aldermen.
She was approaching local governing bodies and asking for contributions to a $25,000 fund to finance a feasibility study of the possibility of home-porting a cruise ship in Brownsville, Port Isabel or South Padre Island.
In the end her coalition included her own Port of Brownsville, Valley International Airport in Harlingen, the City of Port Isabel, the Brownsville-South Padre Island Airport, and the Town of South Padre Island. Island aldermen contributed $6,000 to the study.
She said the Port owns six to eight acres at Isla Blanca Park that could be used as homeport.
"Or we could provide infrastructure anywhere up and down the ship’s channel," she said.
If the idea proves feasible and a cruise ship wanted to come here right away, there are several locations in the Port of Brownsville itself that could be used temporarily, she said.
"We have all kinds of unused warehouse space," she explained.
Lewis said the cruise industry is big business. Modern cruise ships, he said, are the length of four football fields, and can carry between 5,000 and 6,000 passengers. A crew of nearly 3,000 is required to take care of all those people, so the ship is larger than a small city, he explained.
The industry is growing, he said, and displayed line graphs showing growth at the same time the number of travel agents was declining, and even growing right through periods of recession since 1970.
"Cruise lines are very resilient," he explained. "They manage to continue growing even when times are bad. They changed their focus to family travel," he said, "and when they did they began carrying four people to a cabin instead of one or two."
Another thing the industry did was focus on homeports near population centers.
"They brought the cruise ships to the people instead of trying to lure the people to distant homeports," he said.
The liner that started operations in Galveston, he explained, moved its terminal to Houston and watched its business increase tremendously.
Towsley talked about terminals, security, and shore services required to back up a cruise ship. Even the most basic temporary infrastructure, he said, would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars.
The parking lot alone requires many acres, he said. Then there are such considerations as customs booths, always with the idea of moving people through efficiently.
He talked his audience through five levels of terminals, from temporary to deluxe, the cost rising as the amenities and size increased.
Cruise lines, he said, like to move people quickly when boarding and disembarking. They don’t like to see long lines waiting to get on and off the ship, he explained.
He suggested that the local area would want to start with the best terminal it could afford. The better the terminal, the easier it will be to gain favorable attention from a cruise line, he explained.
Towsley warned this was a process that involved a lot of work and planning, and would require a lot of time. He said he worked on his last project for seven years.
"It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight," he said.
In response to a question from South Padre Island Convention & Visitors Bureau Executive Director Dan Quandt, Lewis said the first question that must be answered is, how many people will use the service out of Brownsville?
A Port official in the audience discussed other things to consider. For example, how do the tides and channel depths affect the operation of the ship? The Port, he said, has plenty of land to devote to a terminal, but other considerations will be the proximity of airports, ease of transportation to and from the port, and such things.
Towsley responded that the next step would be to develop a marketing plan that will answer all such questions.
Quandt asked about the strength of the Mexican market for cruises. Lewis said Mexican customers would not be much of a factor unless the cruise ship and the terminal were topnotch.
"You’ll attract only the tourist class at a lower level," he said. "You won’t get the high end Mexican dollars."
