As someone curious about the cruise ship experience but with zero desire ever to board a cruise ship, I was delighted to discover the existence of Emma Le Teace, a 28-year-old from the UK who took her first cruise at the age of 11 and now cruises professionally—as in, hasRead More

A recent Cape Breton Post story painted an uncharacteristically accurate picture of the cruise industry simply by quoting one of its biggest beneficiaries, Dennis Campbell of Ambassatours Grey Line. Campbell’s company is one of two (both Halifax-based) handling cruise line shore excursions in Halifax and Sydney. The story was aboutRead More

Editor’s Note: I’ve added new items to the timeline below, but my real update can be found in this new article, for which I’ve written a new introduction. Rather than repeat myself, I thought I’d let the old intro stand because it still serves a purpose: it explains why IRead More

Real business news is good stuff. I say this as someone who used to read the Wall Street Journal regularly, after a co-worker gave me the sage advice to “throw out the op-ed section and focus on the articles.” The quality of such articles is high because businesspeople, although happyRead More

The arrival of the first cruise ship of the season — the Seven Seas Navigator — in Sydney on Sunday set me to thinking about all things cruise again, so I tried to compose a snapshot of the industry, particularly as it relates to the Port of Sydney, and that’sRead More

My snapshot of the current cruise industry (see part one here) would be sadly wanting if I failed to note that Princess Cruise Lines, fined a record $40 million in 2017 for what the US Department of Justice called “environmental crimes,” has failed to mend its wicked ways. The 2017Read More

Felicity Ace In mid-February, as noted at the time by Tim Bousquet, the Felicity Ace, a car carrier that sometimes calls at the Dartmouth Autoport, caught fire near the Azores. All 22 crew members were rescued from the 650-foot long vessel which was carrying about 4,000 Volkswagen Group cars, manyRead More

It’s time for Confessions of a Bad Reporter. In this week’s episode, I have to confess that I did not attend the Port of Sydney’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) on February 23. It was on a Wednesday night, a week before I publish, and I thought I would be ableRead More

Cruise news And now, from the “counterintuitive” department, I’d like to suggest that there are ways in which COVID may actually prove a boon to the cruise industry. It’s a theory I developed watching a “recovery of cruise” presentation from a November 2020 conference on “post-COVID” tourism in Cape BretonRead More

As you may recall, the Spectator reported some weeks ago on the local implications of the scandal rocking Toronto-based private debt firm Bridging Finance Inc (BFI); namely, that Membertou First Nation borrowed $6.8 million from Bridging to finance its purchase of a stake in Novaporte, Albert Barbusci’s imaginary Sydney harborRead More