CLEVELAND — Cleveland can find itself in some odd headlines from time to time. A few years ago, the one that popped up recently on a website might have seemed like one of them. "Why Cleveland - yes, Cleveland - might be the hottest new cruise destination in North America" the article headline read. But Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne told News 5 recently, the figures back it up.
"Since 2017, the Port of Cleveland has grown the shipping business, and I'm talking about our passenger shipping business by 700%," said Ronayne. "So I mean that growth alone is driving visitors to Cleveland."
Folks like Duane Naff from Tempe, Arizona, who we ran into after touring Cleveland.
"Never been to Cleveland, no," he said. "It's a pretty neat place."
He arrived in Cleveland Monday aboard the American Queen Voyages Ocean Navigator, which was the very ship that opened the Cleveland Cruising season in May. He highly recommends cruising the Great Lakes.
"This is the best cruise I've ever been on, and I've been on about a dozen or so."
One of the beauties of Cleveland is its location right in the heart of it all. You can take one of the waiting tour buses to downtown or the Rock Hall, or you could just walk, like the Murphys from Syracuse did, taking the city in at their own pace.
"It's a great way to travel," said Jody Murphy. "It's very leisurely, and you get to see a lot, and the experience is great."
This summer marked the arrival of three new cruise lines that added Cleveland to their list of stops, including Viking with their massive six-story, 665-foot Polaris that first arrived in June. When we saw it Labor Day weekend, it was one of two cruise ships in town that day, and this past weekend, for the first time, it was one of actually three here at once on Saturday, followed Sunday by a cruise ship from Germany.
"The cruise business really is booming on the Great Lakes," said Dave Gutheil, Chief Commercial Officer for the Port of Cleveland. The Port, though, says next year will be a transition year as American Queen has made the decision to pull their ships out of the Great Lakes in the face of that growing competition from the bigger and newer ships.
"But we're hopeful that others are going to pick up the slack, so I frankly would pay more attention to the number of passengers on the vessel than the actual calls themselves," he said. "I think next year is going to be somewhat of an aberration as the industry does somewhat of a reset. I think the line that is pulling out was feeling some pressure from some of the new lines that were coming in like Viking, like Le Dumont — much ritzier vessels, so to speak. And I think they just chose to deploy those vessels to other itineraries around other parts of the world."
