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The number of cruise passengers worldwide is expected to
grow from 13.4 million in 2004 to 17 million in 2010.
This means the cruise lines will continue to invest in
adding bigger and better ships to their fleets.
- In the early to mid 1900s, ships such as the Prince George,Princess Patricia and Chilcotin took a few hundred passengers up the Inside Passage.
- In the 1980s, a large cruise ship could accommodate
1,000 passengers and weighed in at 40,000 gross tons.
- Today, ships in the cruise fleet are easily twice as
big. The Sapphire Princess weighs 113,000 gross tons and
carries 2,600 passengers—that’s ten times as many
passengers as the old Canadian Pacific cruise ship
Princess Patricia accommodated in 1965.
New coastal ships on the drawing board are slated to
carry 3,000 or more passengers, plus crew—literally
floating cities. Each of the cruise ships sailing to
Alaska represents a capital investment of approximately
$10,000,000,000—that’s 10 billion dollars!
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