After a continuing trend of decreasing cruise ship passengers arrivals in Grand Cayman between April and September this year with an average drop of 22.72% over the six months, October saw a refreshing rise of 9.1%.

Following is a summary table for the Cayman Islands October cruise passenger traffic statistics from the Port Authority of the Cayman Islands:

Oct.      Sept.        Aug.     July              June     May           April

2013    2013       2013       2013             2013    2013           2013

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Passengers       84,529   58,976   67,571   66,874   61,027   76,264      123,422

YoY%               9.1%     -24.3%   -21.7%   -27.4%   -31.8%   -15.8%      -15.3%

As you can see, October also had the second largest number of arrivals with 84,529 passengers. April saw the most arrivals with 123,422 pouring into George Town, although this was down from 2012 with a drop of over 15%.

With a new cruise ship berthing facility now not going to even commence construction until early in 2015 we can only hope and pray the steadily increase in declining cruise ship passengers to our country has finally been halted.

The signs are a little brighter as many of the cruise lines have opted to move some of their ships that normally operate this time of the year around Europe to the Caribbean and will be pulling into Grand Cayman.

At a meeting last Tuesday (5) at The Mary Miller Hall in Red Bay, Deputy Premier and Minister of Tourism Hon. Moses Kirkconnell said the new berthing facility procurement would start in January 2014 that meant the environmental assessment would start in February or March.

“That’s a seven to eight-month process,” he told his audience. “Once that’s finished, if everything goes as we would expect it to go, then the earliest the project would actually start physically would be 2015 January.”

PHOTO: Cruises about.com