P&O Cruises' P&O Oceana is to homeport at Valletta Cruise Port in Malta during 2017, it was announced last week.

P&O Oceana will provide 27 fly-and-cruise departures from Valletta as part of the new homeporting agreement, which will equate to more than 100,000 passenger movements. The vessels will make a further five day visits in Malta, while additional calls are planned for 2018.

"It is primarily thanks to such initiatives that Malta's cruise sector has been successfully evolving and growing from one which was exclusively a port-of-call, to one which now includes home-porting that benefits the Maltese tourism industry in various ways," said Minister for Tourism Edward Zammit Lewis, announcing the decision.

But the announcement was welcomed with dire tones in Genoa where P&O homeported up till now.

The decision, said Genoese papers, means that Genoa loses 100,000 passengers over two years. It also means that the Genoese Cristoforo Colombo airport loses that amount of passengers as well who come on chartered flights from the UK. While the harbour can make up for this loss with other cruise liners, for the airport this is a serious loss.

Up till some time ago, Genoa used to split the homeporting activity with Venice - the ships used to leave from Genoa and arrive in Venice and vice-versa. In2014, the route was covered by the big ship Ventura, one of the biggest ships in the P&O fleet (116,000 tons) but in 2015 it had to be substituted by the smaller ship Oceana (77,500 tons) because Venice banned ships of over 96,000 tons from the Laguna.

Maybe because of this, P&O had decided to stop using Genoa. "This was a purely commercial decision," explained Sergio Senesi from the Cernar Agency. "P&O can handle better itineraries in the Eastern and the Western Mediterranean from Malta."

There is also the issue of security to consider. In recent days, the level of security in Italian ports has been raised to Level 2 and many cruised liner companies have substituted Malta for classical destinations such as Tunis, Turkey or Egypt.

Cruise liner passengers arriving in Malta are on the increase. According to NSO, there have been 125 cruise liners in Malta's harbour in the first six months of the year with 240,000 passengers (6.2% increase on 2015) and predicting over 700,000 by the end of the year.

2017 will be record year: from 14 June to 15 November MSC Meraviglia will bring no less than 5,700 passengers each time it arrives. This is also the first MSC ship to sail under the Maltese flag.

Fortunately for Genoa, however, MSC Meraviglia will homeport in Genoa.