3 Alaskans explain why they want cruise ship limits — even though their businesses depend on tourism

Yahoo

02-04-2025

Juneau, Alaska, has implemented cruise ship and passenger caps to curb its cruise boom.
Three local businesses told BI they support these limits despite relying on cruisers for revenue.
The influx of Alaskan cruises has increasingly strained Juneau's residents and infrastructure.
To visitors scurrying around Juneau, Alaska, Caribou Crossings may look like any other seasonal tourist town gift shop.
To its owner, Laura McDonnell, the 28-year-old storefront means so much more.
McDonnell has worked at Caribou Crossings for 25 years, starting when she was 16. She said she "grew up in that little store," staying through high school and college before eventually purchasing the business in January 2020.
She remembers holding one of her current employees as a baby. When she went into labor, her obstetric nurse had been a previous employee, working at the gift shop to put herself through nursing school.
It's a self-described "typical Alaskan tourism love story" — and it's all thanks to Juneau's booming cruise industry, whose passengers account for 98% of the store's revenue, according to McDonnell.
Like many local businesses, cruisers are vital to Caribou Crossings' health. Yet, its owner supports the city's recent limitations on the vacation-at-sea industry — and she's not alone.
"Southeast Alaska is a challenging place to live, and those of us live here because it's beautiful and because of the lifestyle that it offers," Alexandra Pierce, Juneau's visitor industry director, told Business Insider. "People in the visitor industry, myself included, are locals first, and protecting that balance in our communities is really important to us."
Juneau is the state's busiest cruise hub. Alaska State Sen. Jesse Kiehl told BI that the city only saw 170,000 non-cruise visitors in 2024. It's a drop in the bucket — or snowflake on Denali — compared to the record 1.73 million by-ship tourists who visited last year — a 33% spike from 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study commissioned by the city.
If the growth continues at this rate, it could be a windfall for local businesses like Caribou Crossings.
According to Juneau's study, the cruise industry fed $375 million into the city's economy in 2023. Most of this came from direct passenger spending, as Serene Hutchinson, the general manager of tour operator Juneau Tours, can attest.
"These cruise lines coming to Juneau may be big corporations, but they're benefiting us local companies," she told BI, noting that 95% of her company's customers are cruise passengers.
Yet, like McDonnell, Hutchinson supports Juneau's implementation of a five-ship per-day cap in 2024 and a 16,000 cruise passenger per-day restraint (12,000 on Saturdays) in 2026. The limitations, negotiated with the cruise industry, are projected to maintain the volume of cruise visitors for this and next year.
For McDonnell, it's a worthy trade-off. "We need to manage the tourists we've got before we talk about growth," she said.
The self-imposed restrictions may seem counterintuitive to outsiders: These floating resorts and their passengers are consequential to the livelihood of Alaska's capital city. It's spurred a locally-operated visitor industry boom, a shortlist of which includes gift shops, helicopter tours, whale-watching boats, and excursions to the nearby Mendenhall Glacier.
"Without this economic bright spot, the region would be a different, more struggling place," Pierce said.
However, for residents like Holly Johnson — the 52-year-old chief marketing officer of tour operator Wings Airways and the Taku Glacier Lodge — these caps are a "sweet spot."
About 85% of her company's clients are cruise passengers. Yet, she too supports the restrictions, calling them a "really good sense of what Juneau needs and what is happening in the industry, growth-wise."
Without them, the vacation-at-sea boom could have become increasingly overwhelming for the city — fettered not by demand (which feels seemingly endless) but by the local infrastructure.
Like other cruise-plagued towns, as cruises have boomed, so has local discontent.
In the survey of 501 Juneau residents in late 2024, 20% of respondents said further limiting cruise volume should be the city's most important priority — up 5% from 2023.
On days when the 31,555-person city is slammed with upward of 17,000 cruisers, residents have complained about traffic, noise, excessive wakes from whale-watching tour boats, dropped cell reception, slower WiFi, and even bears searching for garbage visitors leave behind.
"We have to drive through these streets every day, too," Caribou Crossings' owner said. "We know what it's like to live here with cruise ship passengers."
Read the original article on Business Insider