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Photo: GREG BOIS / AFP

Cruise ship industry challenged to show how it works following a report he published saying cruise tourism injected $1.37 billion into the New Zealand economy in the last financial year.

The report, commissioned by the Cruise Lines International Association Australasia and the New Zealand Cruise Association, has not been widely distributed.

However, a press release and infographic released by the organizations indicates that direct spending by passengers, crew and cruise lines reached $637 million last fiscal year, with an indirect profit of $729.2 million dollars for the local economy and that nearly 10,000 local jobs were supported by cruise tourism. , providing $425.9 million in salaries.

Peter Nuttall is the scientific and technical advisor to the Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transportation, the group that pushed the International Maritime Organization to implement a global carbon tax on shipping.

He said Morning report there was no way to verify the reported data.

“Why did the New Zealand media just accept this at face value? Apparently no journalists have seen this report and yet every media outlet is reporting it as factual information,” Nuttall said.

He said the data produced did not agree with international literature in this area or appeared to have taken into account the social good or environmental externalities of the industry “as appears to be a close relationship of the facts”.

“First of all, what we would like to see is transparency in the reporting of data so that you can look at the claims that are being made by the industry.”

There is very little published data and information other than that produced by industry, he said.

Alison Newell, a chartered environmentalist, director of Sailing for Sustainability and advisor to the Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transportation, acknowledged that without the release of the full report it was difficult to assess the figures for indirect benefits provided.

Newell said his request for the full report was denied.

“It’s the granularity of the details they provide that is the problem.

“The reality is that these cruise liners, when a passenger goes on a cruise, they buy a package that includes accommodation and the majority of the food. One of the interesting things that comes out of the international literature is that like the cruise liners Cruise ships have become larger, they provide more facilities on the ships themselves.

“So these are basically huge 20-story industrial complexes fully equipped with duty-free shopping, restaurants, cinemas and all the entertainment.

“One report I saw shows that passenger spending was actually a third of ship spending, but that level of detail is not provided in the latest industry report,” she said. declared.

Nuttall said Stats NZ, between 2015 and the present, had collected specific data on the cruise industry “however, due to budget cuts in Wellington, we understand this data will no longer be specifically reported by Stats NZ” .

“This is a very important industry, many claims are made about it, but there is currently no independent verification and this is the gap that needs to be filled.”

Jacqui Lloyd, chief executive of the New Zealand Cruise Association, said Morning report The main reason the report was not released in full was because it was a members-only benefit.

“So we’re a small industry association, we have a small number of members that allow us to do the work that we need to do and part of that advantage is having access to our core data sets that we’ve created for first time this year.”

Stats NZ has not collected cruise data since the pandemic, Lloyd said.

“So we’ve been a little bit blind over the last couple of seasons and so this was our opportunity to fund something through our memberships to give that benefit back to the members.”

The methodology has now been added to the website, she said, and regional council members, the courts and the government have received the full document.

Lloyd said many jobs have been created solely to serve the cruise industry, such as at ports, coach drivers and tour guides who open their doors only to cruise passengers.

“What we see on average is that about 95 percent of passengers get off the ship when it arrives at port, when it’s a tender port, so when they arrive by small tender, where they don’t actually enter the port per se, that could be around 80 percent of the passengers getting off the ship.

“They will do one of three things: either they have pre-booked a shore excursion with the cruise line and they will go for a tour of the area, they can disembark and have something that they have pre -booked they may have booked themselves through online travel agencies, they may have found something on a website or gone to a visitor center and booked something for the day. , or the remaining third tends to move away and shopping at local retail stores and hospitality.

Infrastructure construction does not appear in the report, she said.