Fincantieri has delivered the new Viking Venus to Viking ahead of the ship’s debut in the UK in May.
The 930-guest ship was delivered on Thursday in Ancona.
It’s the seventh in a series of up to 16 930-guest ships being built for the Torstein Hagen-led cruise company.
The Viking Star was delivered in 2015 and was quickly followed by the Viking Sea, Sky, Sun, Orion and Jupiter, with another nine ships set to follow, plus two 378-guest expedition ships from Fincantieri-owned VARD.
Harland and Wolff with three Viking cruise ships one in the massive drydock.
Led by new owners InfraStrata, Harland & Wolff is lining up cruise ship drydocks for its two large docks in Belfast. A trio of Viking ships was among customers in 2020.
“It was part of a strategic acquisition,” said John Wood, CEO, InfraStrata. “There are no drydock facilities in the UK for cruise vessels. We have two docks, 556 meters and 335 meters, and they are ideally located for cruise ships in Belfast.”
The new owners have been busy investing in the facility, spending money on new dock gates, power lines and robotic welding equipment as well as other upgrades.
The 85-acre facility is also growing. When the new owners came aboard, there were 65 employees, which has grown to over 200, and a new office is being set up in Miami to better liaison with cruise customers, said Wood.
“We expect (this year) to be busy with cruise ships. Everyone has been out of service for the past nine months. We see the classification dockings ramping up as the ships come back into service,” Wood continued, saying he expects demand to increase in the first and second quarters as the industry stages a staggered return to service.
Financial
What will be a huge boost for the cruise industry will be export credit financing on refurbishment projects, Wood said.
“We have worked closely with the UK government and put a couple schemes together. It’s something the UK government wants to do, is to encourage cruise work, and we’ve got two of the biggest docks in Europe and intend to make Belfast one of the cruise refit centres.”
Plans eventually call for deepening the facility’s 556-meter dock, and so far, cruise customer has been happy to hear about export credit options, meaning they can pay for projects later.
“We’ve seen a real shift in the past six weeks. We’ve gone from cruise lines saying ‘Yeah we’ll look at March or April’ to ‘We’d like to dock between these dates and here are our specifications.’”
That has been based on a mix of an expected return to revenue service and export credit financing.
Wood has also gotten creative, hoping to deliver his customers better value for their refurbishment budgets.
“We are looking at docking three vessels in our big dock at once. This will drastically reduce the cost of the drydock for the owners and bring in the OEMs at the same time (for three ships),” he explained. “There are big cost savings there. We’re also working up another proposal around that concept of having two large vessels side-by-side in one dock.”
Excerpt from Cruise Industry News Quarterly Magazine: Winter 2020-2021
Viking has announced its first expedition ship – the 378-guest Viking Octantis – was “floated out” at VARD, marking a major construction milestone and the first time that the new ship touches water.
Scheduled to debut in early 2022, the Viking Octantis will spend her maiden season sailing voyages to Antarctica and North America’s Great Lakes.
A second, identical expedition ship, Viking Polaris, is set to debut in summer 2022 and will sail journeys to Antarctica and the Arctic.
“Working with Fincantieri over the last eight years, we have built the world’s most beautiful ocean ships. We are pleased to continue our partnership with Fincantieri’s VARD and celebrate this important milestone in the construction of our first expedition vessel,” said Torstein Hagen, Chairman of Viking.
“In creating ‘the thinking person’s expedition,’ we are perfecting polar expedition cruising, and we will usher in a new era of comfortable exploration in the heart of North America. Viking Octantis and her sister ship, Viking Polaris, will allow our guests to explore further – to the ends of the earth as well as closer to home. I would like to thank our partners at VARD and everyone working at the yard for the hard work and dedication on the building of Viking Octantis; we look forward to welcoming her to our fleet in early 2022.”
The float out is significant because it denotes a ship moving into its final stage of construction. The float-out ceremony of the Viking Octantis took place on December 22; she was then moved to a nearby outfitting dock for further construction and interior build-out. After final outfitting, Viking Octantis will be delivered at Fincantieri’s VARD shipyard in Søviknes, Norway.
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