Preparations are being made for the return of cruise ships to New Orleans as the Mississippi River cruises are returning first, then the large cruises from the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.

Its first post-Katrina call will be, as we reported on our news ticker yesterday, the return of RiverBarge’s 198-passenger River Explorer. That barge vessel will return to the Big Easy on December 19. The 600-passenger Delphin Renaissance will spend New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in New Orleans. After a slight January slump, embarkation visits begin again, starting with P&O’s 2,600-passenger Arcadia, which will be in port from February 9 - 11. Swan Hellenic’s 600-passenger Minerva II pops in for a day call on February 22.

Otherwise, says Chris Bonura, a spokesman for the Port of New Orleans, the city will have to consider its normally busy fall-through-spring season an unavoidable disappointment thanks to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. However, cruise lines that had planned to homeport vessels there this year are already announcing concrete plans to return to regularly scheduled itineraries next autumn. Among them? Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas, NCL’s Norwegian Sun and Carnival’s Sensation. Interestingly, Carnival has not committed to returning Carnival Conquest, which is now housed in Galveston indefinitely, to the Big Easy though it does plan to resume weeklong New Orleans-based voyages at some point. via Cruise Critic