A CRUISE firm has confirmed that up to 50 jobs could be lost from its Southampton HQ.

Carnival UK said it is planning to transfer its maritime department, which oversees technical and ship operations, to Hamburg.

The move would bring Cunard and P&O maritime departments under one roof with Aida and Costa.

The Marine Operations Centre in Hamburg will be known as Carnival Maritime.

Hamburg is already home to ships of the Aida fleet and is a centre for the construction and refitting of cruise ships. Cunard’s flagship Queen Mary 2 has just returned to service after a £90 million refurbishment in the German port.

Staff in Southampton have been so worried about their future that they have leaked a memo about Project Doppler, in which Carnival UK admits “the perception is that there will be job losses.”

A Carnival spokeswoman said: “There are over 1,000 people employed in Carnival House. The creation of the new maritime operation will affect approximately 50 of these people and no more.”

She added that reports elsewhere saying the IT staff were involved in the move were inaccurate.
The spokeswoman also stressed that Southampton was Carnival’s European HQ and would remain so and the plan was not connected with the EU referendum.
The news of the job losses came in the same week than an industry report confirming Southampton’s position as the Northern Europe’s number one cruise port.
The port saw 1.75 million passengers passing through it in 2015, according to Cruise Lines International Association’s (CLIA) annual European Economic Contribution Report published this week.

According to the report, employment in the UK cruise industry grew by 4.1 per cent to 73,919 jobs in 2015 and accounted for 20 per cent of the market share in Europe.

An estimated 16,397 of these UK workers were directly employed by cruise lines and earned £479 million.