This week 6,255 cruise ship passengers will visit Kodiak, spread across five ships. The largest ship of this summer season, the Nieuw Amsterdam, is included in that group as well.
Starting Monday morning, May 5, Holland America’s Noordam brought in 1,924 passengers to Kodiak. The vessel’s last port of call was in Japan. After leaving Kodiak later that evening, the Noordam will head to Glacier Bay near Juneau. Last year the large cruise ship carried 2,366 passengers to the island.
Tuesday, May 6, the Riviera, an Oceania cruise ship with more than a thousand passengers, visits Kodiak for the first time ever according to an email from the local port agent, Chris Paulson. It’s scheduled to visit the island again about a month from now on June 8.
Wednesday a relatively mid-size cruise ship of about 746 passengers stops by for the day - the Seven Seas Explorer.
And then on Friday two cruise ships visit Kodiak on the same day. Seabourn Quest, the smallest ship of the season, has only 229 passengers onboard. Both the Seabourn Quest and the Seven Seas Explorer are scheduled to visit Kodiak again in September, at the end of the cruise ship season.
The Seabourn Quest will arrive in town for the day alongside the Nieuw Amsterdam, which has 2,106 passengers.
During this year’s cruise ship season, between May and the end of September, 25,663 cruise ship passengers are scheduled to visit Kodiak according to Discover Kodiak, after Hurtigruten Expeditions’ ships Roald Amundsen and Nansen recently canceled their port calls in Kodiak for this year.
Similarly, last year Discover Kodiak was expecting nearly 27,000 passengers but only roughly 24,000 of them stopped in Kodiak. Statewide nearly 1.68 million cruise ship passengers visited Alaska in 2024.
