zoomImage Courtesy: AIDA Cruises

Italian cruise liner company Costa Group and its parent Carnival Corporation revealed plans to hire approximately 4,500 Italian crew members by 2022 to provide support for existing and primarily new ships currently on order.

With over 5,000 Italian crew members currently employed on Carnival Corporation ships, the number of employment opportunities will almost double in number, according to Carnival.

Namely, for 2017, further growth is expected with official launch in June of AIDAperla, the new AIDA Cruises flagship, which made its first call today at Genoa.

AIDAperla will be deployed in the Mediterranean, calling at Civitavecchia/Rome and Livorno every week, with a total of 60 stopovers in Italy during 2017.

“Carnival Corporation is one of the biggest foreign investors in Italy, which is a strategic country for our growth,” said Arnold Donald, CEO of Carnival Corporation.

“Since 1990 we have built 68 ships in Italian shipyards for various brands in our group of 10 world-leading cruise lines, and another 10 vessels are currently on order or under construction, for a total investment of about EUR 32 billion.”

Carnival added that given the great demand for Italian crew members that the new ships will create, Costa Group and Carnival Corporation are looking into working with one or more of Italy’s nautical institutes.

“This is a formula that has already been a success with the Italian Merchant Marine Academy, both for deck and engine staff and the hotel side, with the recent opening of the Academy for Italian Cruise Hospitality in Arenzano,” the company further noted.

The Costa Group today also announced that its fleet carried about 3 million guests in 2016, an increase of 13 percent from 2015. In addition, it expects a further increase in 2017, with the launch of AIDAperla.

In 2016 the Costa Group’s ships made 1,000 calls in Italian ports, equivalent to passenger traffic of approximately 2.6 million passengers, representing more than half of the nearly 4 million passengers carried by Carnival Corporation ships in Italy.