MSC Cruises is preparing its return to Tunisia for the 2022 summer season, with 27 scheduled departures from April to October, departing from the port of La Goulette. Before that, the company is also preparing for this summer, with almost half of the fleet restarting.
MSC Cruises returns to Tunisia with MSC Opera.
“We have rescheduled La Goulette on 27 departures, from April to October 2022. We were impatiently awaiting this restart,” said Patrick J. Pourbaix, General Manager France of MSC Cruises at a press conference on Monday June 21, 2021.
This announcement follows the meeting between Habib Ammar, Tunisian Minister of Tourism, Foued Ben Othman for the Tunisian Ministry of Transport, with Pierfrancesco Vago, Executive President of MSC Cruises and Gianni Onorato, CEO, at the company’s headquarters in Geneva.
MSC Cruises and the Tunisian Ministry of Tourism have also agreed to work jointly on future communication actions, in particular in Italy, France and Germany.
The date of this press conference was also an opportunity to take stock of the current summer season, for which “it is almost half of the fleet that will restart this summer,” added Patrick Pourbaix.
In fact, MSC Cruises will have 3 ships in the western Mediterranean this summer: the Grandioza, the Seaside (departing from Marseille) and the Seashore, which will leave the shipyards at the end of July and will also be positioned from the Cite phocéenne.
There are also 3 ships in the Eastern Mediterranean (Adriatic and Greek Islands), in addition to the MSC Virtuosa which sails around the United Kingdom for British customers exclusively.
“It was not a given, but it works very well, there is a real enthusiasm of the British for the Virtuosa”, continues DG France.
Charter flights all over Europe
Finally, the MSC Seaview will depart in July from the German port of Kiel (Hamburg), passing through Sweden and Estonia.
“We are awaiting news from other ports, very soon, which should open such as Copenhagen, St. Petersburg and maybe even Bergen. We are negotiating, it depends on the evolution of this crisis, but we are hopeful of have a more extensive itinerary by July”, specifies Patrick Pourbaix.
In August will follow the recovery in the Caribbean from Miami for American customers, with mini-cruises.
From September, the company could open to all passengers, including the French, if the USA finally grants the necessary authorizations.
With this strategy, MSC Cruises wants to spearhead the recovery of cruises in Europe.
For this, the company is taking the lead. “Two weeks ago, we noticed that the airlines were not restarting as quickly as us, we are encountering delivery problems, mainly in Venice and Kiel, explains Patrick Pourbaix.
We, therefore, achieved a real tour de force in 10 days, by setting up a program of charter flights all over Europe”.
In France, the company is a partner of Air France. The company will offer flights from Paris to Hamburg and Venice every Saturday from July 17, 2021.
Connecting flights will also be possible from 8 other French cities: Toulouse, Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand, Nice, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes and Bordeaux.
Test stopovers before the official return to Marseille
The next key date for the company in France: July 4, when MSC Seaside will “officially” make a stopover in Marseille, to offer cruises every Sunday.
But the ship has already made a first test stop on Sunday, June 20, 2021, to allow the local authorities (Prefecture of Bouches-du-Rhône, Battalion of marine firefighters of Marseille and the Regional Health Agency of PACA) to confirm the effectiveness of the health protocols put in place.
“We had a maximum authorized capacity of 400 passengers this Sunday and I can tell you that the protocol is working perfectly,” said Patrick Pourbaix, who was present during the Marseille stopover.
Terminal B is very large, everything is distributed on the same level, which makes it possible to have the different zones as provided for in our protocol.”
Also note an evolution of the procedure for screening tests for the coronavirus.”If the antigenic test carried out before boarding is positive, we no longer do a second PCR test. We realized that the antigen test was valid enough, so if a passenger tested positive, we would repatriate them directly,” he concludes.
