San Francisco port drops Mexico cruises

Oakland Tribune, Sep 17, 2006 by Michael Martinez, MEDIANEWS

CRUISES to the Mexican Riviera -- popular for their cheap prices and exotic ports of call -- will disappear from the Port of San Francisco next year as cruise lines look for more profitable itineraries.

Princess Cruises, which this season is offering 23 cruises to Mexico from San Francisco, will pull out of the Bay Area after the Dawn Princess departs on an 11-day sailing April 23. Celebrity Cruises, which had two sailings this year, has also dropped its San Francisco-Mexico itinerary.

Travelers will still be able to cruise to such ports as Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta and Ixtapa, but they'll have to depart from either Los Angeles or San Diego starting next fall. Those ports offer seven- day cruises and faster turnarounds.

The Port of San Francisco continues to be a popular port, though, for cruise ships departing for Alaska and elsewhere.

"We don't like to see our numbers go down," said Peter Dailey, deputy director, maritime, for the Port of San Francisco, "but we're confident this is just a small bump in the road. It may just be a one- or two-year dip."

Officials from both cruise lines said the market from San Francisco to Mexico is still strong, but factors such as ship deployment and the low cost of such cruises caused the change.

"It's quite normal for us to change deployment of our ships," said Julie Benson, a spokeswoman for Princess. "We look at different itineraries, different home ports, and we make changes based on the popularity of cruises, where we see passenger demand.

"We don't have as many ships as we'd like to go everywhere we'd like. Occasionally, we have to pull out of a market to of to offer a different itinerary that may appeal to a different market, for example, Southern California. We'd love to be everywhere, but we don't have that many ships."

Benson said the Golden Princess will sail from Los Angeles next season; the Dawn Princess will make San Diego its home port.

Cruises to Mexico are a bargain. An 11-day cruise on the Dawn Princess, for example, starts at $799 per person -- $200 less than a similar cruise to Alaska from San Francisco. But add in the cost of an airline ticket to Los Angeles, and those cruises become costlier.

Celebrity Cruises sold out both of its Mexican Riviera sailings, said Diana Block, associate vice president of deployment and itinerary planning for the cruise line. But the inexpensive cost of tickets made them difficult for Celebrity to continue.

"It's not a matter of not being able to fill the ships," Block said. We fill them. The issue was the price we sell them at. For people who want to try cruising, there's great value in going to Mexico. We're all for value, but we have to look at how profitable we can be in the market."

Linda Coffman, publisher of Cruisediva.com, said the decision by Princess and Celebrity to leave the Bay Area is probably the result of passenger yields -- the difference between the cost of a cruise per passenger per day and the cost of operating the cruise.

"If they can't get the yields necessary to keep the ship there, they'll pull out," Coffman said. "They don't have enough ships to sail out of every home port, even though there's demand, so if it doesn't make financial sense, they won't stay there."

The news comes at a time when the Port of San Francisco is enjoying record numbers, thanks mostly to the popularity of home- port cruising. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, cruise lines increased departures from more local ports to attract travelers who feared flying.

In 2001, for example, 41 ships pulled into San Francisco carrying about 65,000 passengers, Daily said. This year, 81 ships will dock in the city with almost 250,000 passengers, a record for the port.

Renee Dunn, a spokeswoman for the port, said plans for a new cruise terminal are not affected by loss of business. Construction was supposed to begin this year, but Dunn said the original terminal developer wants to assign the job to another company.

Benson said Princess will continue offering cruises to Alaska out of San Francisco -- 13 this year, 14 in 2007.

"We will definitely be back for the Alaska season" in 2007, she said, and we could be back for other West Coast cruising as well. San Francisco is definitely in that mix."