A fresh and more efficient look at transporting cruise ship passengers to Tauranga's CBD seems to be paying dividends, with numbers 30 per cent up on early-season targets.

After a false start to the 2014/15 cruise ship season due to repairs on the Sea Princess, the first ship arrived on October 17 and since then a further 14 have docked in the Port of Tauranga.

Cruise ships in port. Photo: File.

The next of this season's 84 arrivals is the Pacific Pearl, scheduled for this Saturday morning.

And in the first 10 days of the Cruise Ship City Centre Express Shuttle bus, the service is well ahead of projected targets for the season, proving the new formula is working well.

To date over 1900 passengers have been delivered into the city.

This year Downtown Tauranga are running more buses, more often along with additional ambassadors stationed at both the iPort and the new city centre kiosk on the waterfront.

Mainstreet Tauranga co-ordinator Sally Cooke says it's a model that is already proving more successful, following its inception in 2013.

'While the numbers are still lower than we would like, the trend is good and if we can keep building on the numbers we will have a great season,” says Sally.

'As with last year, and as Tourism Bay of Plenty indicated to us, the beginning of the season is always a little slow.

'So we were never expecting numbers to be huge but at least we have delivered over 1900 tourists into the city.”

Set up last year, the shuttle service to bring cruise ship passengers into Tauranga gavedowntown traders a chance to get a bigger slice of $45-$50 million that cruise ship passengers spend in-port.

The initiative, run in partnership with Bethlehem Coachlines, offers tourists on the cruise ships a direct return trip to the city centre.

'If our numbers continue to grow steadily we hope to achieve in excess of 10,000 tourists into the city centre this cruise ship season, which will be a solid increase on last season's numbers,” adds Sally.

'This initiative is self-funding, so as not to impact on our mainstreet members, so we are very pragmatic in our approach and have the ability to constantly change the model throughout the season to meet demand and maximise tourist numbers. So far, it is working well.”

With data indicating the average cruise ship tourist spends in excess of US$100 a day in an iPort, Downtown Tauranga are hoping to capture their share of this spend into the city centre.

Tourists on the buses receive a city centre brochure and cruise offers from participating businesses, designed to specifically attract the tourists into selected businesses.