NOBODY WANTS TO CRUISE FROM BAYPORT 
How’s that effort to bring some actual cruise business — or really, any kind of business — to the Bayport Cruise Terminal going? Not so well. After contacting more than a dozen cruise operators last October, the port authority got no responses. The last and only departures made from the $81 million Pasadena facility, which opened in 2008: a couple of Carnival Cruise Ships shut out of Galveston for a short time after Hurricane Ike. [Bay Area Citizen] Photo: Commercial Care Services
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I’d gladly go on a cruise from Bayport if there were any ships leaving from there. It’s a much shorter drive than G-Town is.
Good Gawd: a $81 million waste of taxpayer money ! And the idiots @ the Port Authority of Houston should be shot and then fired for massive construction project that had NO contracted cruise lines BEFORE the thing was built !!! Can we say : “throwing business to favored construction companies that more than likely have ties to the Port Commissioners?”
I think that it is safe to say that the whole lot of port commissioners are corrupt. The crap that they have pulled over the last several years have been well documented by the TV news dudes. I don’t know why the whole lot are not in jail.
So much for build it and they will come.
“Let’s just build, build and build just so we can stay really busy adminstrators of the taxpayers’ money”. “It’s all about deal flow, right?” “The velocity of structured transactions!”
I think it should become the designated port of no choice for all of the cruise ships that catch on fire, have massive cases of gastrointestinal illness, rampant cold and flu virus outbreaks, or suffer a rogue wave hit. Bayport: A place slightly preferable to your death trap ship.
The whole idea was flawed from the start. Is Galveston the most beautiful terminal in the world – no, but is the trip to the Bayport a great drive, nope. Add on the bonus of starting your cruise with a leisurely cruise of the Houston Ship Channel….definitely not a great idea. Sad part of is, I am sure over $100k was spent on a marketing study showing it would work.
From the linked article:
“In a 2008 promotional video, a voiceover declared that ‘The Bayport Cruise Terminal will offer you a one-of-a-kind experience’.”
…if a cruise terminal that isn’t served by any cruise line qualifies then, yes, it will.
Unless Galveston is full or unavailable, ships simply won’t sail an hour or two further north, to reach the exact same customer base. Plus Galveston at least has a historic downtown within walking distance and a beach 5 minutes away, giving something for people to do right before or after the cruise that isn’t 40+ minutes away (like most of Houston is from Bayport).
The only way Bayport will be successful is if more cruise ships want to come here than Galveston can accommodate, and that probably won’t happen due to geography limiting our natural market. Texas is just too far to the northwest for a cruise ship to go to the Caribbean and back in 7 days, or even 9. One-week cruises are far more common because of ease of scheduling (both people’s vacations and all the ship’s suppliers). That limits Texas (and New Orleans) to a very niche market–people want to go only to Mexico, Central America, and possibly Grand Cayman, and who don’t want to or can’t afford to fly to Florida.
I have fairly well off relatives who are ‘deathly’ afraid of flying. They take the train to the cruise line, no matter how far or long it takes.
They’ve seen a good part of the U.S. in this manner. They took the train to CA, then a ship to HI and back. Same to Bermuda, and extreme north eastern US and Canada. And Alaska. They are retired, have the time and money so why not?
Departure from Galveston suits them just fine when the ship is “going their way”.
As to the Bayport facility, whoever approved that boondoggle should be made to repay the county. Then they should be jailed for life. Or maybe shot.
The location of the whole Bayport development was a farce from the beginning. You can thank the port commissioners from the days of the EIS for this complete waste of money. The alternative analysis, if uninfluenced by politics, would have clearly shown that Galveston was the preferred location for this terminal. God forbid that Harris County lose the tax revenue. Now we have a termimal that has had far greater impact on the surrounding residents than the EIS led these people to believe in the form of light and noise pollutions, sedement shoaling of marinas and creeks, as well as ridiculous heavy truck traffic on Highway 146. I would like to see the Port of Houston offices forced to move into this building and their existing building leased out to another entity. They built it, they should have to use it since nobody else will.
You ever wonder if this was all a guise to sneak in a container port?
Craig – when I say terminal, I mean container port. PHA threw in a cruiser terminal to try and fill out the purpose and need justfication for the project under NEPA. It’s a shame that no one at the Galveston USACE called their bluff on whether they really had any tenants or not.
Only growing tourism to the Bay of Campeche (Veracruz, for instance) could increase cruises from Galveston, because it’s true, @ Dave 106, that Miami is better poised than Galveston to sail to emerging tourist destinations in Honduras or Nicaragua, etc.