St Vincent tourism Minister Kishore Shallow revealed that the Kingstown cruise port has operated at a financial loss for four out of the last five years.
Speaking on the urgent need for a new transformational investment, the Minister provided stark context regarding the government’s intervention into the port’s financial trajectory.
He noted that the only profitable year for the facility in recent history was 2023, which generated a marginal profit of just 266,000 EC dollars. For the other four years in that five-year span, the port operated entirely at a loss.
Further compounding the issue, the port’s cumulative expenditure during this period totaled just over 15 million EC dollars.
Minister Shallow emphasized the heavy burden of these figures, explaining that the government was spending millions to operate at a loss—funds that would have been much better invested elsewhere given the challenging global economic climate.
However, Shallow expressed strong confidence that the newly signed agreement with GPH—the world’s largest cruise port operator—will drastically reverse this trend.
In stark contrast to the port’s recent financial drains, the new partnership will bring a phased investment program totaling a minimum of 250 million EC dollars in its first two phases, he said.