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Broadcasting from the Ensuremytrip.com studios in Jacksonville, Florida. This is Cruise Radio.

Hey, what's up? My name is Doug Parker. Thank you so much for checking out this episode of Cruise Radio. Very happy to have you here, my friend. If this is your first time listening, well, we have about 300 back episodes for you to listen to, so you could find them all right there at CruiseRadio.net or just search Cruise Radio in iTunes. Coming up on today's show, we had a chance to head down to Miami a couple of days ago. If you're listening to this in the future, it was January 11, 2015, and Kathy Lee Gifford is teaming up with Carnival Cruise Line again, not dancing around the Lido Deck in a bathing suit, but this time she comes bearing wine. She has her own wine collection, as you may know, from the Today Show where they're

drinking wine every single morning. So we had a chance to catch up with Kathy Lee Gifford aboard

Carnival Breeze the other day. But first, as always, it's Stuart Chiron the cruise guy. What's up,

Stuart? Hey, Doug, doing great yourself. Good man, jumping right to it. Now, we've been back and

forward to this news story

over the past couple of years but i just read where venice is lifting their cruise ship ban what's

really going on here well it kind of sounds like we're doing the hokey pokey yeah we got our left

foot in we got our left foot out a tribunal has overturned the italian coast guard's decree

which had banned cruise ships over 96,000

tons. So that means that essentially the cruise lines, if they wanted to, could begin sailing

of the larger cruise ships. But unfortunately, Clea had voluntarily acquiesced to the ban, and because they have this, they

essentially have to make those changes, you know, years in advance to make sure they've got

the right ships sailing. So essentially, that's not going to impact 2015, but it should have

an impact for schedules in 2016.

But it is an unfortunate loss of about 300,000 fewer cruise passengers visiting Venice,

which is probably got to hit them in the pocketbook all of Italy to probably over a half a billion dollars.

Yeah.

Because if you remember, it's not just Venice that's affected.

It's different ports that these ships also visit.

So, you know, Chivitaveccia, Livorno, Teremina, Naples, those are all impacted.

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