With an estimated number of more than 1 million cruise guests in 2017, Denmark are looking at the most fantastic year so far when it comes to cruise tourism. A period of zero growth in the number of cruises in Danish ports has stopped, and a positive turnaround has occurred. This was one of the key messages at the general meeting of the Danish cruise network CruiseCopenhagen last week in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Here the positive development and the benefits from it were discussed by the members and the network itself seems to be the key to at least some of the success. Ports, destinations and other actors within the cruise network are competitors but nonetheless they manage to stand together in the task of attracting the coveted cruise liners. To Soren Jespersen, the chairman of CruiseCopenhagen, this is significant to the organisation: “The cruise industry in Denmark is strengthening its position and recognition in society these years and with almost 2,000 fulltime jobs it has taken a standpoint in Danish growth. That has a lot to do with the fact that our members understand that working side by side in a joint effort in order to make ourselves competitive with other destinations is the way to move forward,” Soren Jespersen says.
Director of CruiseCopenhagen, Claus Bodker, agrees and states: “This year we celebrate the 25th jubilee of our organisation which also is one of the oldest of its kind in the world. By working together about subjects from as different areas as raising money to improve the tourist information to gaining better media exposure of our cruise products, we succeed in attracting more guests and at the same time delivering the best possible product to our guests,” Claus Bodker says.
And speaking of the guests, a survey initiated on behalf of CruiseCopenhagen in 2016 showed that 94 percentage of all transit and 97 percentage of all turnaround passengers were satisfied or even very satisfied with their stays in Copenhagen. That is the best result measured by CruiseCopenhagen so far.
