According to the Floating Hotel Association of Egypt, a total of 310 floating hotels were in operation in the Nile River between Luxor and Aswan in the year 2006. This 223 km length cruise route is suffering high traffic densities, vulnerability to hazard accidents, and thus threatening the ability to secure safe journeys. Also the current insufficient berthing lengths led to the concentration of floating hotels in several parallel docking rows. Consequently, several hazardous accidents at different locations were recently documented during the top tourist season of year 2017. On the other hand, the number of floating hotels was linearly enlarged at a rate of 10 units a year, which will make the projected number of tourist hotels in 2025 around 499 units. With such rate of increase, the number of expected accidents and aground coincidences will be doubled, while parallel docking for several rows despoils the privacy of tourists as the berthing units would be very close to each other. To face such circumstances, the number of expected cruising programs was hypothetically increased in the present study by adding various possible tourist routs along the Nile River. Accordingly, the average route length would be indirectly increased and the tourist vessels would be dispersed along a lengthier stretch of the river. The objective of the current study is to examine the impact of increasing the number of cruising programs on improving the safety and working efficiency of floating hotels navigation.
The present study proposed five additional cruising programs that would take place between Aswan and Cairo with a minimum and maximum cruising route of 118 km and 928 km respectively. A significant reduction in docking shortage between Aswan and Luxor was achieved relative to the present cruising program. The study revealed that applying the innovated scheme by year 2025 will significantly reduce the number of docking units and consequently the docking lengths in Aswan and Luxor to 63.5 % and 82.8 % of the existing condition respectively. Also the proposed scheme will lead to reduce the needed berthing length between Aswan and Luxor in the year 2025 to 27.8 % of the existing condition. Our findings show that the floating hotel cruises should be extended to cover several attractive sites distributed along the Nile River between Aswan and Cairo.
|
