More than 70 cruise visits set for 2024

The recently published schedule shows that the first cruise ship of the year is set to be small, 230-capacity Hanseatic Nature on Sunday 7 April.

Islanders will not have long to wait for the biggest ship of the year, with Nieuw Statendam set to visit on Thursday 18 April. The Dutch vessel can carry more than 3,200 people. It is currently offering cruises around the Caribbean, but will cross the Atlantic in early April. It will call at Brest ahead of coming into the Little Russel.

Unless more liners are added, it is set to be a quieter year for big cruise ships this year.

There were about 25 cruise ship visits scheduled in 2023 for vessels with more than 3,000 people. That compares with just six so far on the schedule for this year – five of which will be by the 3,000-capacity Ventura.

The Virtuosa – which visited twice last year – can carry more than 6,000 people, but is missing from this year’s schedule. Its timetable shows it calling at nearby Cherbourg and Le Havre instead this summer.

Instead there are more small and medium-sized ships visiting, including the 1,685-capacity Borealis, which is due to visit on Liberation Day.

As well as 74 Guernsey cruise ship visits, there are set to be two each to Sark and Herm and four to Alderney.

The last cruise is set to call in mid-October.

This is the first version of the cruise schedule, and it is likely to change as vessels confirm their itineraries.

So far the numbers are slightly down on the same period last year, when it was planned there would be 76 calls in Guernsey, 10 to Alderney, five Sark visits and four to Herm in 2023. There eventually ended up being more than 100 trips scheduled on the final list last year, but more than 15 were cancelled, either through itinerary changes or bad weather.

Cruise ship numbers have struggled to recover since the pandemic.

The first ships returned in 2022, when there were more than 79,000 travellers. Last year there were 85,500.

This compared with 112,000 in 2019.