TeaPotVille
Remember back in the heart of the pandemic when the usual suspects 'round here were lighting their hair on fire because the premier of the day wouldn't/couldn't force the feds to get rid of rules that prevented massive floating petrie dishes from landing in Lotusland while legislators in Alaska were passing laws that allowed said dishes to sail straight from Seattle to Anchorage without a stop in British Columbia?
If you can't quite remember all those burning sticks of epidermally produced keratin, here's a sampling straight from the bonfire, written by the Dean of the Legislative Press Gallery in a Vancouver Sun column published on September 15, 2021:
Well....Horgan’s last line of defence is that cruise ship operators will include B.C. ports in their itineraries even if they are not obliged to do so in U.S. law.
Maybe. But the premier has been wrong at every turn...
That was then and this is now, as per the lede of Derrick Penner's stenography piece published this past weekend in the VSun:
The arrival of Princess Cruises’ Sapphire Princess at the Canada Place cruise terminal on April 12 will be symbolic of a hoped-for continuation of tourism’s rebound in Vancouver.
It will be the first of what the Port of Vancouver expects to be a record 331 cruise ship visits to the city in the 2023 season...
Imagine that!
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5 comments:
331 cruise ships burning tons of bunker fuel for no worthwhile reason. Climate crisis? What crisis?
That’s good, I guess. I know the company I used to work for will be happy as they do a lot of tours from the floatplane dock just to the west of the cruise ship terminal. Covid ended my job with that company after many years but that may have been a good thing.
I do feel sorry for those visitors to Vancouver though who only see the downtown area and the zombies “walking” around. While there are a few good things to do and see down there I generally wouldn’t recommend it, but I’m an outdoor activity kind of guy and so tend to lean in the direction of those sorts of things. If the folks I see pulling their luggage through the streets of the centre of the action zone only see that then I can’t imagine they will come back or give good reviews. To be fair that can probably be said for many places and their downtown’s. For me a lot of what makes Vancouver good is where it is, not what it is, and because of this we don’t try very hard to improve the what. If one were to take any mediocre city and put it in the exact location of Vancouver it would instantly get at least the same amount of praise and probably more if they had already been taking steps to make there city better than it’s “meh” surroundings.
Floating septic tanks.
The cruise ship industry is somewhat vastly over rated for its benefits.
Owning/operating a tourist oriented business in downtown Vancouver, the economic spinoffs were few and far between.
The high end stores did well of course, where American tourist took advantage of favourable exchange rates to smuggle watches and jewelry back into the USA.
Tour operators did well, as of course hotels and restaurants, within a 30 minute walking distance from the ship.
But I found American tourists to be cheap, taking cheap cruises and treated locals with contempt.
From my point of view, the cruise ship industry created tourism tunnel vision, where all investment be for the cruise industry and nothing more.
Well that was two decades ago and nothing much has changed, except the American tourist is far cheaper than before and far more condescending.
Vancouver has turned into a dump of course, with tent cities ringing the downtown core, aggressive panhandlers and just the usual detritus from an out of control drug problem.
From what I have heard, is that Vancouver is now considered as a high priced tourist trap, with little to offer and the stop in Vancouver is more for the convenience of being near YVR, than anything else.
I think in coming years, Vancouver will become less and less a tourist destination as we become more and more LA North.
The cruise industry has good P.R people who know how to get the message out for their employers. They manage to get their message across on evening newscasts without problem so of course they are going to carry on as if its the end of the world.
The cruise industry doesn't care about the well being of those living here in B.C. they are only interested in their bottom line.
P.R. people are good at instilling fear in some. The sky will not fall in when we had COVID and now that it has some what been reduced, its back to business as usual. For all their carry on, the sky did not fall in,
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