Tourism to focus on independent travelers and the small cruise ships

Independent travelers and passengers aboard small cruise ships are vital to Wrangell's tourism season, and they're exactly what the community is focusing on - regardless of Canada's decision to keep its waters closed to the larger cruise ships that come to Alaska.

"We're moving forward with marketing to independent travelers ... it's huge for us," said Carol Rushmore, the borough's economic development director and head of the Wrangell Convention and Visitor Bureau.

"The fact that we don't rely as heavily on the big ships is to our advantage," she said last Friday.

In 2019, the last pre-pandemic summer, Wrangell counted more than 25,000 visitors, about 80% aboard cruise ships, including some mid-size ships now blocked by Canada's decision, and the rest split between arrivals by air, state ferries and private yachts.

Summer tourist spending in town exceeded $5 million in 2018, the most recent year reported in the Wrangell Economic Conditions Report issued by the borough last spring.

The community was in line in 2020 for cruise ship stops with a total capacity of almost 24,000 passengers, almost four times the number of cruise visitors in 2010, according to the city economics report.

This year's cruise ship schedule for Wrangell is still tentative, but includes several ships that plan to operate the summer entirely in Alaska waters. Pending confirmations from the companies, Rushmore said, the port calls could include American Cruise Lines, Alaska Dream Cruises, UnCruise Adventures and Lindblad Expeditions, which between them operate 11 ships with capacity ranging from 40 to 170 passengers per ship.

Wrangell is working to open communications with the small-ship operators on COVID-19 protocols for a safe summer season, Rushmore said. That will include working with other Southeast communities to develop consistent operating requirements.

Meanwhile, the entire cruise industry has been waiting on federal guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"That's the bottleneck," Robert Venables, executive director of the Southeast Conference, said of the lack of CDC guidance for the industry.

"We're in the midst of a pandemic where there is no finite answer," Josh Carroll, vice president for destination development at Royal Caribbean cruise line, said during a tourism panel discussion at last week's Southeast Conference mid-winter meeting.

The Southeast Conference, which is comprised of representatives from the region's municipalities and chambers of commerce, is working to develop an areawide COVID-19 mitigation plan for cruise ships, Venables said Monday. It will work best if all ports operate under the same rules for passenger activities in town, health protocols and response to any infections.

Royal Caribbean, which would be blocked from its Alaska cruises unless Canada changes its policy or U.S. federal officials come up with a workaround, is operating one cruise ship out of Singapore this winter, Carroll said. "We're learning a lot of how to operate in this environment."

Regardless of whether the big ships can make it to Southeast this summer, the region's tourism industry is working hard to ensure that independent travelers make it to Alaska.

"For a lot of our communities, it's going to be more important to drive that independent traffic," Liz Perry, president of Travel Juneau, said at the Southeast Conference. Visitors "want to know that destinations are doing everything they can" to keep tourists safe, she said.

Rorie Watt, Juneau city manager, is leading the conference's effort to draft COVID-19 protocols for Southeast tourism. Here, too, the lack of CDC guidance is a problem, he said during last week's panel discussion at the Southeast Conference.

Juneau, similar to Ketchikan and Skagway, is heavily dependent on the more than a million cruise ship passengers that have come to Southeast in past years. "It feels like we're slowing bleeding ... it's been a miserable experience for everyone," he said of the prospect for a second summer without the large ships.