Ships ahoy! Cruise ships eye return to Charlottetown Spring 2022

It's been about two years since cruise ships last docked in Charlottetown and now the local port authority is preparing for a comeback. 

The first ship is scheduled to arrive mid April and 75 ships are booked for next year. Port authorities say cruises are sailing to other parts of the world successfully.

Many companies are asking for vaccination records and proof of a negative COVID test to board.

"I think it's going to go very smoothly, we're doing all of our protocol development right now and, you know, it's restarted globally worldwide, so there's a lot of best practices out there in the industry of how cruise has resumed," Charlottetown Harbour Authority CEO Mike Cochrane said. 

"You can not contain the excitement … we're really looking forward to restarting cruise in 2022."

Charlottetown doesn't know the expected passenger numbers yet for 2022 — but in 2019 roughly 130,000 people came on cruise ships.

With all those people came a lot of money.