Miami plans to out-gun rival port

Surely it’s just a coincidence that within days of Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades announcing a record day for cruise passengers, rival port Miami, a few miles down the coast, is revealing plans for a new “mega-terminal.” Isn’t it?
Miami is where the cruise boom started, back in the 1970s, and it still lays claim to the title “cruise capital of the world”, with more than four million passengers a year.
Although it will be the home port for NCL’s Norwegian Epic, launching this summer, it lost out to Port Everglades for the two biggest cruise ships in the world, Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas.
Miami is investing about £8 million on new terminal facilities for Epic, but that will be small change compared with the investment in a new road tunnel linking the port to the Interstate 95 highway and Miami International Airport.
Now port authorities are proposing further investment in a new terminal which could handle four ships – and their passengers – simultaneously. To be built on what is currently a cargo yard, it could be operational by 2015.