The UK boss of A-Rosa River Cruises plans to operate a fully hybrid-powered fleet by 2030 as she outlined how the sector must protect destinations for future generations.
Lucia Rowe, UK and Ireland managing director of A-Rosa River Cruises, said the line’s sustainability efforts would go into “supercharged” mode from May onwards when it launches hybrid-powered vessel, A-Rosa Sena.
The 280-passenger ship will be able to generate electricity from exhaust heat and will be able to arrive and depart from ports “emission-free”, thanks to its battery power.
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The German river line hopes to retrofit existing vessels and launch new ones with “hybridisation” power technology by 2030 to ensure it achieves net-zero emissions by 2040.
Rowe (pictured) said the line had set up a sustainability department to realise this ambition.
“Hybridisation of the entire fleet by 2030, on our way to achieving net-zero by 2040. Dream big – we are and the whole industry is. Please follow us on our journey,” she said.
Addressing agent delegates at the Clia RiverView Conference in Budapest, Rowe urged the trade “to be ready” for customers who ask about a river line’s green credentials, even if many are not doing so now.
“That customer will come one day and choose based on sustainability,” she added. “It will be expected.
“We have all started as an industry to pioneer and innovate because everything about river cruising is about the destination.
“We all promote the destination first. If we don’t protect the destination first – there’s nothing to sell for future generations.”
Fellow panellist Ben Wirz, Uniworld managing director, admitted he did not know how the sector’s drive to be greener would affect pricing.
But he added: “We’ll have to wait and see what happens. The choice is not do we want to invest or not, it’s do we want to survive as an industry? That’s the fundamental question.”
He concluded that retrofitting ships with environmentally-friendly technology was “much harder” than launching vessels already with green features.
Rowe claimed A-Rosa already knew how to retro-fit vessels with hybrid-power technology. “This is our journey,” she said, adding: “There are technological advances every single day. We just need to see what’s next. It’s going to be a collection of all of them.”
She went on to add that river lines were aware that being sustainable was not about “a return in investment”.
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