Norway Cruises Hit All-Time High In 2023

22.08.2023 - 11:57 / forbes.com / Cruises

With nearly 4,000 port calls forecasted, 2023 is shaping up to be a record year for Norwegian cruise ports. The industry association Cruise Norway points to the war in Ukraine and the weak local currency as the drivers, but other factors are surely at play too.

With the high season almost over, Cruise Norway stated there should be 3,847 cruise port calls by the time the year is out. Individual passenger visits, counted each time a ship docks at a port, should reach 5.5 million, an astonishing increase of 29% over 2022.

Bergen, Norway’s busiest cruise port, also expects a record year with 722,000 cruise ship passenger visits.

Cruise Norway CEO Inge Tangerås said to NRK that “2023 is undoubtedly an all-time high” and points to the weak Norwegian Krone and the conflict in Europe as major factors. “Some of the traffic from the Baltic Sea has shifted to Norway due to the Ukraine war,” he said.

At the end of July 2021, one U.S. Dollar bought 8.82 Norwegian Kroner. That figure rose to 9.66 in July 2022 and 10.14 in July 2023. This weakening Krone has led to an increase in independent travel to Norway and higher levels of domestic tourism.

Figures from Statistics Norway show that overnight stays in hotels, cabins, and campsites in June 2023 were up 1% over the previous year, and 7% up on 2019. However, the weak Krone is unlikely to have made too much difference to cruise demand.

Cruise passengers use a fixed onboard currency, typically the U.S. Dollar although the British Pound or Euro are also sometimes used when cruises target the British or German markets, both important markets for tourism in Norway.

Compared to a final cruise bill, the amount of local spending in the Norwegian Krone is a drop in the ocean for most cruise passengers.

Baltic Sea itineraries were always a niche market in the worldwide cruise industry. But with St. Petersburg temporarily off-limits to most travelers, cruise lines that maintain Baltic Sea itineraries have begun to offer the likes of Oslo and Kristiansand in Southern and Eastern Norway as alternate ports.

Kristiansand, a port used to handling 50 cruise ship visits per year before the pandemic, is set to receive up to 130 ships this year. Some of this growth has come from the winter season and shoulder seasons of the spring and fall.

Back in 2018, the Norwegian government ruled that ony zero-emission vessels could sail in the Norwegian fjords that have UNESCO World Heritage status. The date of this implementation remains uncertain, but is presently set to be no later than 2026.

Although the four new cruise ferries from Havila Voyages are capable of sailing on battery power for up to four hours, no mainstream cruise line meets the strict upcoming requirements.

If regulations are