Peddling the Pacific

By David North

It may be useful to think about cruise ships visits as a specialised, side-effects free economic opportunity.

Suppose you are the Finance Minister of an island nation, and you are trying to attract a (US) million-dollar-a year factory for one of your port cities.

Nailing down the factory may mean extensive negotiations with the owners )who have other pleasant islands to choose from); in addition, the factory may foul the environment or use up lots of local resources (such as fresh water or timber). Further, the factory operators may want a freehold pur chase of the site, and your nation’s cus toms and laws insist on non-alienation of any land.

As you— and perhaps your poten tial critics —examine the fine print of the deal,, you realise that only a small part of the $1,000,000 in sales will stay in your country. All profits, interest pay ments and patent fees (if any ) will be shipped overseas; most to all of the raw material will be purchased elsewhere; some of the salaries paid to the expatri ate managers will go overseas, as will money for shipping in the raw material and shipping out of finished product.

And you, the Finance Minister, have already agreed to a 10-year-old tax hol iday.

What’s left is, say, about $240,000 in wages, which, for the sake of conver sation, is what is paid to 240 factory workers who get $lOOO a year, or, in a higher-wage island, 120 people receiv ing an average of $2OOO a year. That’s obviously important to the port city, but it promises to be a major headache for you and for everyone else involved.

There is a much easier way to pump $240,000 a year into the econo my.

Arrange for eight day-long cruise ships visits, averaging 750 passengers, each of whom will spend an average of $4O per visit for meals, drinks, handi craft, and local travel; that is 750 x $4O x 8 = $240,000. (this is not to suggest that industrial development should be ignored).

The cruise ship numbers are real istic, and perhaps low. According to the

travel section of a recent New York Times the 830-passenger “Golden Princess” of the Princess Line will spend the period Dec 7, 1994-Feb 17, 1995 sailing from Auckland to Papeete, with

stops at Noumea, Suva, Pago Pago,

Bora Bora, Moorea, and Christmas Island in Kiribati, visiting several of these ports more than once during the season.

At $4O per person per visit, a fre quently-cited estimate, a port call by the “Golden Princess” brings a $33,200 burst of business every time it drops anchor, in addition to any supplies pur chased by the ship itself. And there are no hotels or factories to build, no contin uing demand for electric power, no pol lution, and no damage to the environ ment; in short, this represents nearly side -effects-free economic develop ment.

But for every “Golden Princess” that spends part of each year in the South Pacific, there are scores of cruise ships— by definition portable— that spend their entire year in waters else where in the world.

Further, and even more troubling to the South Pacific tourist industry are the near misses— cruise ships that come close, but spend little or no time in island ports.

The best example is the annual “round-the-world trip of the huge “Queen Elizabeth II”. Carrying 1,850 affluent passengers (they must pay (US) $24,990 to $152,440 for the whole voyage) , the next trip is 102 days long and it cuts right through the heart of the South Pacific but spends only three nights in island ports. The ship is sched uled to stop at Pago Pago and Suva on the way to Australia, and then at Rabaul on the way out of the area.

That last stop, on February 16, 1995, will bring some welcome cash to a

city recently devastated by volcanic

eruptions. (Cunard told us in October that Rabaul visit was still on, and that the line was sure that passengers would

be safe.)

The “QEH” is one of the largest cruise ships afloat, and can not dock easily in many ports, but there are other, smaller vessels that could be spending

more time in the South Pacific, one could sense from the Times listings, but have no plans to do so.

For example, the 1,075 passenger “Rotterdam” leaves Los Angles on January 23, 1995 for a “round-the world cruise which will take 85 nights. On its way across the Pacific it visits Hawaii, of course, but stops at only one island, Yap in FSM, between Honolulu and Manilla.

That is a remarkable 5,500-mile journey (Hawaii to Manila) with only a single landfall, which must mean many con secutive days at sea, an annual sched ule for any cruise ship. Why not visit Christmas Island, or Palau, or some other islands along the way?

One more example of the so-near yet-so-far theme; on Feb 22, 1995, the “Royal Odyssey” will steam out of Sydney headed for Singapore; will it look in on, say Suva and Rabaul en route?

No. The decision-makers chose to go around Australia the other way, call ing at such exotic locations as Adelaide and Perth on way to Indonesia. It carries a maximum of 750 passengers, none of whom will be able to spend any time, or money, in our islands.

Generally speaking, the South

Pacific is not an easy place for the cruise ships. It is not a few hours air travel from well-to-do First World nations as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean are handy to the U.S. and Western Europe, respectively.

Ships cruising the South Pacific must seek a more affluent crowd than those found on the one-week cruises in the West Indies and around the Greek Islands.

There is another, once-a-week

complication for cruise ships operating

in some parts of the Pacific — the deeply religious character of some islands causing them not to want cruise ship visits on Sunday. The “Never on

Sunday” syndrome is a continuing mat

ter for island-cruise ships negotiations and schedule adjustments.

But cruising is a growing industry;

more ships are built each year, and every year there seem to be more and more people with the money and the tome to go cruising. Further, many of

them have done the West Indies and the Greek Islands, and they want some thing different. It is real opportunity for the South Pacific, and these are some of the steps that might be considered.

Selling the South Seas to the

Cruising Industry:

There is a small population of mid dle managers employed by the several dozen cruise lines; most of them are in New York, London, and Tokyo. They work out the schedules each year and,, like middle managers everywhere, pre fer not to take risks. If Saint Kitts, Saint Thomas, Saint Croix and Saint Martin ( all near to each other in the Caribbean) worked last year, they will decide to repeat the pattern in the following year.

Many of these managers and their bosses never have seen the South Pacific. Nations wanting more cruise ships visits, and, perhaps, paying all or part of their travel expenses so that they can see for themselves.

Less expensive in money, but more so in an ambassador’s time, would be for Fiji’s and PNG’s ambas sadors, for example, to telephone a key manager or two and invite them to lunch. How often does a middle manag er get such an invitation? Perhaps some of this wooing of the cruise lines could be done on a regional, rather than

a national basis, which leads to the next point.

Putting it on the Forum’s

Agenda:

Perhaps the South Pacific Forum, or another of the multiplicity of regional organisations, could make the encour agement of cruise ships a major subject of joint action, Perhaps the Forum could open— on a test basis— a cruise ships office in, say, New York.

The Forum would announce at the time that if the office did not produce a 50 percent increase in the South Pacific cruise ship port calls in three or four years, the office would be closed and the manager and staff would be fired.

This is one public sector activity in which it is very easy to keep score.

It might be easier to set such a tough standard for a public tourist pro motion authority at the regional, as opposed to the national level, where tourist bureaus are often patronage operations of the party in power.

Encouraging more islands based cruise ships: Some ships roam the world, others have home bases. Few of them are based in the South Pacific, however.

Although the Times twice-yearly listings are not complete, it is worth noting that again this year there are only a handful

of cruise ships listed as being based in the islands.

The largest of these is the 148passenger “Wind Song” owned by Windstar Cruises, that operates seven day cruises out of Papeete all year around. It calls only the French islands.

The largest collection of them, a fleet of six small vessels holding from eight to ninety passengers, works the waters and islands of the Galapagos in the Eastern Pacific. Charles Darwin’s early work on evolution in these islands inspires many of the visitors.

Then, too, there is the 42-passen ger Melanesian Discover cruising the northern coast and the islands of PNG; it used to have a sister ship but now works alone.

More ships with this pattern would, of course, bring more people to more South Seas ports.

Cleaning up the Harbour:: It would also be helpful if would-be cruise ships ports put their best foot for ward, and made themselves as attrac tive as possible so that the ships would return. If the island’s public Works Department can only be energized sometimes to paint the pilot boat, or clear away abandoned cars and other junk, let it be energized the day before the cruise ships arrives! ■