Chinese tourism industry insiders take a tour on the Spectrum of the Seas on April 26, 2024 as the cruise vessel is redeployed to Shanghai. Photo: Chu Daye/GT

The recovery of China's cruise market accelerated on Friday with the return of another large foreign cruise ship to Shanghai's Wusongkou International Cruise Port.

After four and a half years, Royal Caribbean International's Spectrum of the Seas was redeployed to Wusongkou International Cruise Port on Friday for a year-long stretch and is set to take thousands of Chinese passengers in a voyage to Northeastern Asian destinations on Saturday. 

The Spectrum of the Seas, one of the Asia's largest cruise ships with a maximum capacity of 5,200 passengers, arrived carrying nearly 4,000 foreign tourists from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia. This marked the largest single influx of foreign tourists to China in recent times.

Previously, on March 15, the MSC Bellissima arrived in Shanghai, marking MSC Cruises' return to China after a four-year hiatus.

The return of foreign-owned, top-class cruise ships to Shanghai is a milestone in the recovery of China's cruise market since the announcement of the reopening of its border and the restart of cross-border tourism in 2023, analysts said. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, China's cruise market was the second largest globally.

Xie Xie, a research fellow with the China Waterborne Transport Research Institute, told the Global Times said the final missing block in the recovery of the Chinese cruise industry has been fulfilled with the full-scale return of international cruise ships using Shanghai as its home port.

Since China restarted the industry, it has undergone a four-step recovery process. This includes some voyages conducted last year to test the waters, the reactivation of China's cruise ports along its coast, and the commercial operation of China's first domestically built large cruise ship, the Adora Magic City, operated by CSSC Cruise as the first three steps, said Xie.

"The Chinese cruise market is a fast-developing market with 70 percent of passenger being first-time visitors, this differs from Western markets, where the majority of passengers have taken cruises more than once. The potential of the market is huge," Liu Zinan, chairman of Royal Caribbean Asia, told the Global Times on Friday.

China's cruise industry has experienced a golden period of growth in the decade before the COVID pandemic crippled the global tourism industry.

In 2019, China's international cruise market was already 10 times that of Japan, only surpassed by the US which is the world's largest cruise market, according to media reports.

Xie said that the Chinese cruise market is expected to handle nine million passengers a year by 2035 and it needs a total of 38 cruise ships in service.

The Wusongkou International Cruise Port in Shanghai is Asia's largest, and one of the world's top four largest ports for cruise ships.

With the recovery of the industry, the port witnessed, for the first time, four cruise vessels making berth simultaneously on March 5, according to local news outlet thepaper.cn. The port is hoping to welcome 159 visits in 2024.

During the upcoming May Day holidays, a total of 40,000 inbound and outbound passengers will be processed at the Wusongkou port, an increase of 150 percent from the level seen during the Spring Festival holidays, the China News Service reported on Wednesday, citing Shanghai immigration inspection authorities. 

According to a report by the China Cruise & Yacht Industry Association and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the cruise ship industry could contribute a total of 550 billion yuan ($81.05 billion) in economic output to the Chinese economy by 2035. 

Year-to-date figures show that nearly 10,000 international tourists have sailed with Royal Caribbean to China, according to the company.