1st cruise ship to arrive in Victoria next month

Thursday, March 17, 2022

Hundreds of cruise ship calls and hundreds of thousands of cruise passengers are expected to arrive in Victoria this year, with the first vessel set to arrive in April.

Princess Cruises’ Caribbean Princess will arrive in Victoria on April 6, marking the first cruise ship to arrive in the city since October 2019 and the first cruise ship to arrive at any Canadian port over the past two years.

The Caribbean Princess is the first of 358 cruise ship calls that are scheduled to arrive in Victoria between April and November.

With those ships comes an estimated 780,000 passengers, according to the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority.

On March 7, the federal government announced that all passengers and crew must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to travel aboard ships that enter Canada.

At the time, Transport Canada said that passengers would need to take a molecular test within 72 hours of boarding a cruise ship, or take an antigen test within one day of boarding. Passengers would also be tested again after arriving in Canada, the federal government said last week.

However, Canada was planning to lift its pre-arrival COVID-19 testing requirement for fully vaccinated travellers as of April 1.

It’s unclear if that policy also applies to cruise passengers as of Wednesday. An official announcement from the federal government is expected Thursday.

In 2019, during Victoria’s last active cruise ship season, some 709,042 passengers and 294,956 crew members arrived in the city aboard 257 cruise ship calls.

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