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India’s complicated immigration and customs
bureaucracy may have dealt the country’s cruise business another material blow.
Alan Lam reports.
Azamara Club Cruises, the luxury subsidiary brand of Royal Caribbean Cruise Ltd.
(RCCL), is considering dropping Indian port calls from 2017, after its guests
and crew having experienced considerable delays and inconvenience upon arriving
at Chennai Port on 8 December 2014, according to a media report.
The crew and passengers had to wait at the port gate for about two hours before
being allowed to land, owing to duplication of paperwork. Even the media
contingent waited 20 minutes before being able to board the ship.
“If India wants cruise liners to call on its ports,” Captain Jose Vilarinho told
reporters on his ship Azamara Quest, “then the procedures have to change. When
the immigration and customs formalities are completed in a shot time at Indian
airports, the [sea] ports can also do that.”
He made it clear that the problem did not lie in port facilities, but with the
immigration and customs authorities. “We may not be calling on Mumbai port from
2017 onwards,” he warned, signaling that the RCCL group had been deliberating on
this matter.
While both the cruise lines and India’s tourism authorities are keen to develop
the country’s cruise potentials, its notorious bureaucracy continues to be one
major stumbling block. It has been cited as a main reason for this country’s
cruise business being so underdeveloped, as compared to other similarly dynamic
economies in Asia.
Azamara is the latest of a series of cruise lines having suffered this kind of
misadventure at the hands of Indian bureaucrats.
Given the nature of and the lead-time required for cruise ship itinerary
planning, once the line decides to drop India, it could take a long time and a
lot of effort to lure it back again. |
