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Passengers load their bags into a taxi at the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal on August 9. The terminal operator has called for more robust transport options to accommodate cruise passengers after reports of long queues of people waiting for taxis. Photo: Sam Tsang
Opinion
Mike Rowse
Mike Rowse

Go back to original Kai Tak plans to fix cruise terminal transport fiasco

  • The scenes of tourists waiting in long queues for taxis are a public relations disaster decades in the making
  • Deviating from the project’s original plans and delaying needed infrastructure have hurt terminal operations, and this must be fixed quickly
Mike Rowse
Mike Rowse
Why you can trust SCMP

“If a picture paints a thousand words...”, wrote David Gates of the pop group Bread in 1971. Unsurprisingly, it was a hit for the band. Such powerful imagery explains why most languages have a similar expression and concept: words, spoken or written, do not have the same impact.

That is why the recent images of well-heeled tourists queuing outside the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal waiting for a taxi sparked such a strong reaction. Within days, the government had convened an urgent, high-level meeting to establish what went wrong and what could be done about it.
After all, it doesn’t matter how many good stories there are about Hong Kong or how well we tell them, the local and overseas media will always be on the lookout for a negative one, especially if there is a good picture to back it up. The truth is this has been a public relations fiasco just waiting to happen for more than a decade.
For me, the story began in May 1999 when – much to everyone’s surprise, including my own – I was appointed as Hong Kong’s first commissioner for tourism. I was already a director in the Financial Secretary’s Office, the schedule of which had recently been expanded to include negotiations with the Walt Disney Company.

The first step was to set up a tourism strategy group to bring together the big beasts of the industry and thrash out some ideas. One that emerged early on was a proposal for a purpose-built, world-class cruise terminal to manage the larger vessels rather than the smaller type of ships which Ocean Terminal could handle.

The Kai Tak Cruise Terminal has been criticised for its poor public transport connections. Photo: May Tse
Up until then, much of the emphasis in marketing Hong Kong as a tourism destination was on our reputation as a “shoppers’ paradise”. It was fine to keep that up as long as we could, but eventually competing destinations might catch up, and Dubai and Hainan have since done so. Even if we could maintain our edge, there was surely no harm in having an extra string to our bow.
Hong Kong is ideally located to be the hub for the cruise industry in Asia. A seven-day voyage north to Japan has attractive stopover options in Taiwan, Shanghai or South Korea, or south to Singapore with potential stops in Hainan, Vietnam or Thailand. Cruise passengers could begin in Hong Kong and fly home from the other end or start at those cities and finish here. Cruise passengers are almost by definition relatively well off, exactly the kind of leisure visitors destinations seek to attract.

Thereafter, the cruise terminal project became part of the Kai Tak development planning proposals. In many ways, this was an ideal arrangement: the harbour is one of Hong Kong’s major attractions in its own right, so having large cruise ships dock at the heart of it would give visitors a fabulous vista. The deep water alongside the old runway was ideal for a berth.

The overall plans for the area included many compatible uses that would complement each other. The downside was that any rethinking of parts of the area’s development or delays in providing infrastructure would have an impact on terminal operations, which is more or less what happened.
The cruise terminal itself opened in 2013, but many planned roads in the vicinity have still not been completed. The monorail idea was scrapped, there is no public transport interchange and limited parking. The complementary facilities are nowhere in sight. The terminal is served by a single road – an accident on it on the day the mega ship arrived effectively blocked access in and out for a couple of hours.

The terminal operator and the cruise lines are familiar with the situation and have introduced several workaround solutions. On the day in question, around two-thirds of the passengers were transported smoothly away from the terminal on prearranged coaches and other forms of transport.

A Hong Kong-based transport expert, Alok Jain, told the RTHK Backchat programme last week that other temporary solutions were also feasible, for example gazetting and preapproving special bus services to kick in automatically on vessel arrival days. Jain also strongly endorsed the original package of transport arrangements drawn up by government planners.

Hong Kong cruise terminal operator rejects commercial revamp, stresses role as port

But the problem of insufficient taxi numbers remains. Some additional incentives are being introduced, but these are essentially palliative measures. We want our tourism sector to be flourishing, not clinging on for survival.

We should revert to the original development package and see how many items can be restored quickly. There is vacant land nearby for parking and an adjacent site that could be sold for hotel development. If the monorail will not go ahead, then we need a quick decision on an alternative.

In conclusion, we have a situation where the tourism strategists were right to anticipate challenges to our status and the need to expand the tourism product. The transport planners were correct in their assessment of passenger needs once a world-class facility was in place. We now need to improve implementation.

Mike Rowse is the CEO of Treloar Enterprises

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