Two enormous cruise ships enter the port of Dubrovnik (Gruz) as 2017’s cruise season begins…
Dubrovnik and cruise ships is often a rather sensitive topic for residents, and finding balance, as with all things in this strange thing we call life – is essential. The arrival of a cruise ship (and rarely is there just the one) brings traffic jams as far as the eye can see, crowds of people moving as if they were one huge carpet, shops left without stock and the boiling hot, stone walled Old City quickly resembles a long snake pit. The other side of the coin is that cruise ships are essentially gigantic vessels of money for the city, with somewhat fleeting visits of thousands of tourists with cameras leaving eye-popping amounts of cash behind them. It seems 2017 is going to be no different, despite a calculated 9% drop in cruisers visiting Croatia’s southernmost destination.
Early this morning, two imposing cruise ships part of the Viking Ocean Cruises family made their way into Dubrovnik’s busy port at Gruz. Viking Sea and Viking Star were carrying an estimated 2000 passengers. Viking Sky, another massive member of the #1 Leisure and Travel rated cruise company is set to arrive on the last day of March, with ten more ships expected throughout this glorious spring month. April, where things really start moving when it comes to Dubrovnik’s tourist season is expected to welcome 33 cruise ships, with an incredible 51,000 visitors disembarking from them and descending upon the walled city.
Despite the aforementioned 9% drop in arrivals in comparison to 2016 which saw close to one million arrivals, 2017 is set to be another expectedly busy year when it comes to cruisers, with 577 of them expected to arrive throughout the course of the year, bringing a whopping 760,000 passengers with them.
