The cruise industry is going to need an estimated 9,000 deck officers and engineers to operate the 120 newbuidings that are scheduled to take to the water over the next seven years.

That figure was given by Carnival Maritime’s vice-president of marine human resources, Tino Hensel, at the CruiseConnect crewing conference held today in the Philippine capital of Manila.

Eric Visser, director of seagoing workforce management at the Holland America Group, which manages Carnival Corp subsidiaries Holland America, Aida, and Costa, added that when ratings and hotel crew are factored into the equation, these new ships will require a total of 120,000 seafarers to man them based on an average of 1000 crew per ship.