MIAMI – According to an industry adviser speaking on Seatrade – the world’s largest business-to-business cruise conference, held in Miami Beach last week, the cruise industry may not return to pre-pandemic passenger numbers until 2023.

“It’s all very encouraging, but I don’t see until next year that we will see significant gains (in passengers),” said David Selby, owner of Travelyields Ltd., a cruise consultancy, in a speech at the Video call conference from UK. “I don’t see us going back to 2019 levels until 2023 or possibly longer,” he said, adding, “only time will tell.”

“It all depends on whether there are, God forbid, new variations,” he warned.

Selby presented figures showing that the cruise industry has steadily increased the number of passengers in the years leading up to the pandemic. The industry recorded 28.5 million passengers worldwide in 2018 and 29.7 million in 2019, but it dropped to just 5.8 million in 2020, a decrease of 81%. Before the pandemic, Selby’s Travelyields had forecast 32 million cruise passengers worldwide in 2020, an increase of 6.7%.

Miami’s cruise lines suspended their trips on March 13, 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic quickly spread around the world. The country’s first cruise since then departed from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale on June 28, 2021. The industry has slowly started up again with reduced capacity and with COVID-19 mitigation protocols.

The Cruise Lines International Association, which collects data on global passenger numbers, has not yet released data for 2021.

The Seatrade conference registered 11,000 participants in 2019. The first day of the conference over two years later had fewer than 100 personal attendees in a medium-sized room in the 1.4 million square foot Miami Beach Convention Center. While industry leaders repeatedly told in-person and virtual attendees that the cruise was back, speakers like Selby stressed that the industry’s return is likely to be slow and complicated.

“The steady return beckons, but it will return,” said Selby. “It’s been a slow and painful reintroduction.”

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