The mega cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam, which is on its maiden voyage after being built at a shipyard in Italy, docked this morning at the port of Gruž in Dubrovnik, reports slobodnadalmacija.hr.
With it came 2,106 passengers and 929 crew members. The cruise ship is 285 meters long and has 11 passenger decks. To remind, Croatia and Turkey were declared the best cruise destinations in 2009 by the Spanish specialized Cruises News Media Group, which also awarded them the Group’s Excellence Cruise Awards. This award demonstrates not only that Croatia is an important destination for cruise ships but also that this segment of tourism is growing. This is also evidenced by data from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, which shows that the number of passengers who visited Croatia by cruise ships has doubled in the last four years, reaching nearly one million passengers in 2009. According to the latest data from the CBS, last year there were 754 cruise trips by foreign ships in the Croatian Adriatic, which is 8.3 percent or 68 trips less than the previous year. However, these ships brought 5.3 percent more passengers, totaling 989,200.
