MSC Cruises SA plans to invest a further R30 million in Durban’s cruise terminal, and expects to see a slight increase in the number of cruise passengers sailing out of the city in the 2023/24 cruise season, according to Ross Volk, MD of MSC South Africa.
The cruise line, the only one that currently homeports annually in the city, expects to see 110 000 cruise passengers during the coming cruise season, compared with 108 000 last season.
The investment adds to the R300 million MSC Cruises has already spent to develop a new cruise terminal in Durban, enabling the facility to accommodate the cruise line’s largest ships.
“The downstream impact is incredible. We do 36 to 40 trips a year out of Durban up to Mozambique. This is a major sector of the hub for MSC. It’s also a major conduit of getting guests through,” said Volk, speaking at a recent roundtable discussion hosted by Durban Tourism.
“This year alone we have provided employment to around 784 South Africans, especially to the youth of this region, but our target is to provide more than 1 000 jobs to the people of Durban and surroundings.”
Volk added that MSC procured as much produce as possible for meals during the cruises from local small, medium and micro enterprises. In this instance, from Durban’s agricultural food producers.
In addition to being the homeport hub for MSC Cruises’ annual South African cruise seasons, Durban is also a major cruise port for visiting ships sailing the South African coast on ‘safari cruises’.
Dube TradePort CEO, Hamish Erskine, said the safari offerings across the African continent had “re-boosted” tourism, from Durban to Zimbabwe and Lusaka.
Durban Tourism Deputy Head, Winile Mntungwa, said the advantage that Durban had was that it was land-, sea- and air-based, in terms of transportation, so tourists had a variety of transportation modes to choose from.
However, King Shaka International Airport in Durban lacks direct international connections to the world’s major source markets of North America, Europe and Asia, while South Africa’s primary cruise source market, Johannesburg, mainly choose to drive rather than fly to the city.
