Cruise ships are still anchored and it looks like they will stay that way for some time to come. However, the first bookings for next year are trickling in. The Rotterdam cruise terminal expects to receive its first ship as early as August, but it is still questionable if enough tourists are willing to travel by then.
This was reported by RTL Nieuws, the news department of Dutch TV channel RTL.
Faizal Siddiqui thinks that the cruise sector is the very last in line to restart. He sells cruises all over the world with his company CruiseReizen.nl, but is now waiting in the wings. According to him, cruising is not yet allowed, because the ships normally call at several countries, all of which have different rules.
Still, Siddiqui sees light at the end of the tunnel. Bookings for next year are slowly coming in, for CruiseReizen.nl this amounts to about a quarter of the normal number of bookings. Travel agency TUI, which also has its own cruise ships, sees a similar level of bookings. ‘We receive new bookings on a weekly basis, so that’s good news. The winter still lags behind, but for the summer of 2021 we are on a hefty plus,’ says a spokeswoman.
Source: ANP
