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From Venice and Amsterdam to Maine and Key West, popular tourist destinations are taking a hard look at cruise ship traffic and the crowds and environmental pressures they generate.
Among the most recent destinations to consider limiting that traffic is Juneau, Alaska, which has a population of 32,000 and received 1.65 million cruise ship visitors last year. Yesterday, the city released the final results of a recent vote over whether cruise ships should be banned on Saturdays: The proposal was rejected.
Out of the 28,113 residents eligible to vote, 10,880 had voted, with 4,196 in favor of the initiative called “Ship-Free Saturdays” and 6,575 against.
Juneau — the capital of Alaska and the entrance point to the Mendenhall Glacier, a favorite cruise ship excursion — sees as many as 20,000 cruise passengers per day during the high season, which runs from April to October. The initiative was devised to ease overcrowding, but residents and officials who were against the measure cited concerns about the expected negative impact on local businesses.
“The ship pollution and excessive visitor traffic is very real, but banning them for an entire day is not the answer,” said Laura Murray, a resident who voted against the measure. “We need to find a better solution, introducing measures that will protect our environment without hurting the local economy.”
Last year, on Saturdays alone, the cruise industry generated $3.7 million in cruise-related fees and taxes for Juneau, and passengers spent $30 million at local businesses, according to the city government. Protect Juneau’s Future, a coalition of local businesses, travel agents and cruise operators opposed to the initiative, raised more than $350,000 to campaign against it.
Three major cruise lines — Royal Caribbean Group, Carnival Corporation and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings — each contributed $75,000 through their companies and subsidiaries, according to the Alaska Public Offices Commission.
“We believe joint, collaborative, and direct dialogue is the best way to maintain balanced and effective tourism management to ensure long-term economic stability and livelihoods in Juneau,” Cruise Lines International Association, the industry’s trade group, said in a statement.
But Karla Hart, a Juneau resident who spearheaded the “Ship-Free Saturday” initiative, has deeper concerns about the well-being of her community. “We are all paying for the profits these businesses are making,” she said, “with our physical and mental health, with our time spent in traffic, with displacement and fuel spent to get beyond the reach of the ever-spreading impacts of cruise shore excursions.”
Juneau has already imposed a limit of five cruise ships per day, and has signed an agreement with four major lines to cap the number of daily passengers at 16,000 starting in 2026; on Saturdays the cap would be 12,000. The total for the 22-week season would be about 2,376,000 passengers. Residents who support the Saturday initiative argue that these new measures still allow continued growth from the 2023 figures of 1.67 million passengers.
“We are a community that was feeling stress at just over a million passengers in 2018, and a lot of stress at 1.3 million in 2019,” Ms. Hart said. “Now the industry and allies are saying that they want to ‘level things off’ at about the 2023 level.”
Dan Blanchard, a Juneau resident and chief executive of UnCruise Adventures, a small-ship cruise line, said the Ship-Free Saturday initiative would have likely impeded progress by hurting local businesses.
“We like to think of ourselves as a far-off community that is self-sustaining, but we need outside business and in recent decades that has come in the form of tourism,” Mr. Blanchard said. “My friends in the hospitality and restaurant business say that if there are no ships, they are likely to close down on Saturdays and that will turn Juneau into a ghost town.”
Other risks include the possibility of lawsuits from private dock owners and cruise companies that already have bookings through 2026. In 2022, after residents of Bar Harbor, Maine, voted in favor of capping the number of passengers at 1,000 per day, local businesses sued the town. In February, after a yearslong battle, a Federal District Court ruled in favor of the restriction.
In 2021, in Key West, Fla., there was a similar battle with the state government after residents voted to restrict ship numbers. After a long legal battle, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, signed a bill in March overturning the results of the vote and approved a lease that would allow larger ships to dock.
Mr. Blanchard, who has served on Juneau’s Visitor Industry Task Force and worked on measures to curb overtourism, said he, too, is frustrated with the crowds. “I am no big ship guy, I detest them, ” he said. But instead of banning ships he believes the city should focus on building the infrastructure to disperse foot traffic and ease the flow of passenger activities, like hiking and whale watching.
The city is currently working on a plan to build another pier, which will allow ships to dock away from the current area and ease congestion in the downtown area.
“These mitigation measures are what we need to focus on,” Mr. Blanchard said. “Initiatives like Ship-Free Saturday will only get tied up in court and nothing will happen.”
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