2018 archived information

2018 Annual Traffic Statistics

Overall passengers and vehicles

• A total of 577,069 passengers used the Isle of Man harbours during 2018, 38,387, or 6.2% fewer than in 2016.
• Eight of the twelve months saw decreases, the last 7 months all experiencing reductions.
• Only the first quarter saw an increase. A 21% fall in passengers in April meant that Q2 had a 7.4% decrease, with Q3 and Q4 following with 8.8% and 7.6% decreases respectively.
• Over 551,000 passengers passing through the IOM harbours travelled on scheduled ferry sailings, 95.5% of the total.
• Non-scheduled crews and passengers declined substantially by 17.9% with 25,845 using the IOM harbours, over 5,600 fewer than in 2017.
• Scheduled service passenger vehicles saw a less worrying decrease of 3.2%.

Scheduled passengers and vehicles

• Scheduled passengers' throughput in 2018 was down by over 32,800.
• Although April saw the largest scheduled passenger fall of 12,300, this has to be set against a huge increase of 18,500 in April 2017.
• Liverpool and Heysham traffic both fell, with Liverpool down by 18,700 passengers or 6.5%. Heysham saw a smaller reduction of 11,700 – 4.4% Liverpool continued to be the strongest route, with 267,780 passengers, against 253,074 for Heysham, Liverpool accounting for 48.6% of the scheduled sea travel passenger market for the Island.
• Passengers on Dublin were slightly down by 1.7% over 2017 with 8,727 passengers.
• The Belfast route was 9.4% down, carrying 21,643 passengers.
• 180,106 scheduled passengers' vehicles were transported to and from the Island during 2018, a 3.2% decrease over 2017.

Non-Scheduled passengers and crew

• Commercial non-scheduled passengers were down in 2017 by 20% to 21,345. Marina and Non-marina passenger and crew numbers increased by 5.8% to 4,500. The withdrawal of the Karina, which carried 6,640, passengers in 2017 was the main reason for this fall.
• The 23.1% increase in cruise ship traffic was the one bright spot in a disappointing year. Cruise ship visitor numbers increased by 3,120 to 16,618.
• Fishing crews were down by 29%, and support vessel crews were slightly up on 2017 levels.
• Crews and passengers from all other categories of non-scheduled commercial activity saw
  decreases, the most notable being super yacht activity where there were no visiting passengers from super yachts at all during 2018, and tall ship numbers were also well down.