Hamburg, terminal completed ahead of schedule

Hamburg - The German ability to manage public infrastructure construction had been put into question following a series of disasters at the new Berlin airport. Whatever doubts existed, have been completely dispelled by the Port of Hamburg’s third cruise terminal, the BER airport fiasco turning out to be just the exception that proves the rule. While completion of the huge BER airport, which will replace the two currently in operation, keeps getting postponed and costs just keep rising, the new cruise ship terminal on the Elbe river is another story. When the dust settles, this mega-terminal will have been completed ahead of schedule and the final expenditure will be smaller than the one originally planned. Cruise Centre 3, or CC3, will, in fact, start operations in June (with construction work finishing as early as May), while the project’s blueprint had provided for the terminal to open in the summer. Jens Meier, managing director of the Hamburg Port Authority, has also announced that costs will be reduced by €16 million from the original estimate; This had been set at €58.6 million: €30.9 million for the facilities and €27.7 for access infrastucture, transport and parking, with space for 1,500 vehicles, 20 buses and taxi stands.

The new terminal, situated in Steinwerder, will complement two existing terminals (HafenCity and Altona) and will be geared towards the larger cruise liners, with capacity for up to 4,000 passengers, in line with the cruise industry’s clearly defined trend. The terminal will have two buildings, totalling 10,600 sq.m., one for arriving and one for departing passengers, with a total handling capacity of 8,000 passengers. There will also be facilities to provide ships with electrical power and refuelling. These form part of the SmartPort programme, which sets out to make available the most advanced solutions to cruiseship companies and so reduce emissions while in port, allowing ships to shut their engines down minutes after docking. A similar facility, built by Siemens at a cost of €10 million (partly financed by EU contributions), will open in June at Altona’s terminal 2. Also in June (from the 1st to the 5th), one of the world’s largest conference on ports will be held on the theme, again, of intelligent port management. The new mega-terminal’s features have undoubtedly contributed to the Port of Hamburg’s recent success as a cruiseliner port. Costa Cruises’ move – through its US parent company – to base its new Carnival Maritime unit here, is proof of that success.

Meanwhile, last weekend Aida Cruises, Costa’s subsidiary company, opened its 2015 cruise season at the Port of Hamburg with the docking of AidaMar, after a 14 day cruise. By the end of the year five ships from the Rostock based cruiseliner will make a call at Hamburg, for a total of 55 stops, representing just under a third of Hamburg’s total cruise ship traffic. In 2014 the total number of stops here was 189, with a total of 590,000 passengers passing through (compared to 378,000 for Rostock, former head of the list, and 354,000 for Kiel, now in third position). Its cruise sector business alone, earned the port €270 million, an all time record which, however, according to rough estimates, could be exceeded again this year. This is due partly to the creation of Cruise Gate Hamburg, a company that will exclusively dedicate itself to managing the cruise ship terminals and the dockings, with the goal of keeping every cruiseline company that docks here happy, a task not always possible in the past.