Cruising Gets Good Start

Peter Krupa January 18, 2008

The Queen Victory is an enormous boat. Sprawling the length of three football fields and weighing in at 90,000 tons, the ship sits 12 stories above the water and can accommodate 2,000 passengers.

It’s a brand new ship. And it’s stopping in Costa Rica on its maiden voyage.

The Queen Victory is one of 98 ships from five companies that will be stopping at the Pacific ports of Caldera and Puntarenas this cruise season.

Since August, the season has so far seen almost 50,000 passengers disembarking at the port of Puntarenas for 12 hours of tourism on land.

Meanwhile, Caldera – which often functions as a base for cruise ships to take on supplies and begin and conclude their cruises – will see 51 ships, with an average of 1,800 passengers in each.

César Clark, the head of Caldera’s cruise division, said that’s an increase of 22 ships over last year’s traffic, which in all sent a little more than 17,000 passengers browsing among the tourist shops surrounding the port and staying in hotels in Caldera and San José while waiting for their ships to set sail.

The Queen Victory will be docking at Puntarenas on Wednesday, and will mark the halfway point in the Pacific ports’ cruise ship season.

At the Caribbean ports of Limón and Moín, 140 cruise ships are expected to dock this season, about the same number as last year, according to the Costa Rican Tourism Institute.