To start off the 2019 cruise season Warnemünde welcomes the cruise liner MSC Poesia of the Italian shipping company MSC Crociere on April 19. All told, 199 port calls by 41 cruise liners are expected on 117 days of this year. 188 times the ships will berth in Warnemünde and eleven times at the overseas port. Seven of the vessels will be heading for the mouth of river Warnow for the first time: Aegean Odyssey, Celebrity Reflection, Nieuw Statendam, Norwegian Pearl, Seabourn Ovation, Silver Spirit and Viking Jupiter.
About 40 percent of all cruise tourists in Warnemünde begin and end their sea voyage at the Baltic Sea spa, another 40 percent go on local and regional day trips to Schwerin, Güstrow, Bad Doberan, Rostock and Warnemünde and around 20 percent use their stay to visit the German capital, Berlin.
Germany’s largest, Rostock-based cruise shipping company AIDA Cruises will have three ships regularly calling at Warnemünde for the first time this season: AIDAaura, AIDAdiva and AIDAmar.
The Swiss-based shipping company Viking Ocean Cruises has included Warnemünde 20 times in the schedules of its four sister vessels Viking Jupiter, Viking Sea, Viking Sky and Viking Sun.
Apart from the 45 port calls involving turnaround of passengers by AIDA Cruises, 47 port calls with partial turnarounds of passengers are planned by the Italian shipping companies Costa Crociere and MSC Crociere and by the US shipping company Princess Cruises, during which mainly Italian and German passengers will embark or disembark. The successful cooperation between the airport Rostock-Laage and ROSTOCK PORT will be continued this year, too. The shipping companies Costa and MSC will again use the airport Rostock-Laage to fly their southern European guests for the Baltic cruises in and out.
The sailing list for 2019 includes 34 port calls by cruise liners with an overall length of more than 300 meters: Celebrity Reflection and Celebrity Silhouette with 319 meters length each, Norwegian Getaway (326 meters) as well as Regal Princess (330 meters). Norwegian Getaway is the largest vessel of this season with a gross register tonnage (GRT) of 145,655.
New terminal building at berth P8 to be ready for 2020 season
Until 2020, ROSTOCK PORT together with the federal state of MecklenburgVorpommern and the Hanseatic and University City of Rostock are going to invest more than ten million Euros in the construction of a new passenger terminal at berth P8. After the completion of the planning permission procedure initiated in February 2018 for the extension of the „Information and Organization Centre for Maritime Tourism” ROSTOCK PORT GmbH gave the green light for the start of construction of a roofed complex of buildings at berth P8 in Warnemünde in October 2018. The building will have a total length of 186 meters and a width of 30 meters. The height will be similar to that of the Warnemünde Cruise Center. With an area of around 3,400 square meters the terminal is to take into account the importance of cruise tourism for the city and the federal state as well as the requirements of cruise guests and partner companies alike. The foundation work for the complex of buildings as well as the foundation slab were completed during the winter half-year of 2018/19. The building construction itself will be implemented from mid-October. The terminal is to be opened at the start of the 2020 season.