Are We Running Out of Places to Put All These Cruise Ships?

Every once in a while, I come across a cruise industry statistic that makes me stop and read it twice.

This week, that number was 84.

According to the latest global cruise ship orderbook from Cruise Industry News, there are now 84 new cruise ships scheduled for delivery through 2039. Together, they represent nearly 230,000 new berths (space for one passenger to sleep) and an investment approaching $89 billion. The average new ship on that list costs more than $1 billion.

As someone who loves cruising, my first reaction should probably be excitement. More ships means more choices, more itineraries, more restaurants, theaters and pools, along with presumably several dozen additional ways for me to get separated from my money once I’m onboard.

But my second reaction was a little different as I thought, where exactly are we going to put all these things?

I don’t mean where we’re physically going to park the ships. Cruise lines are pretty good at figuring that part out, but I’m wondering where we’re going to send all the people sleeping in those 230,000 new beds.

Because the cruise industry has an interesting problem. It keeps getting better at building ships and convincing us to sail on them, though I’m not sure we’re getting any better at creating another Rome, Santorini, Juneau or St. Thomas.

First, Let’s Look at the Numbers

There are different ways to count the global cruise fleet depending on which operators and types of ships are included, but Cruise Industry News counted 459 ships worldwide at the beginning of 2026. Based on the current orderbook and expected fleet changes, it projects that number growing to at least 540 ships by 2037.

The passenger numbers may be even more interesting.

Cruise Industry News estimates the industry currently has annual capacity for roughly 36 million passengers. Over the next decade, that could approach 50 million passengers a year. And while older ships will certainly retire as new ones arrive, the current orderbook alone represents another 84 ships and nearly 230,000 berths entering the market through 2039.

That doesn’t mean we simply add 230,000 beds to today’s total. Ships retire, some move to smaller operators and others leave the market altogether. But there’s no mistaking the direction.

The cruise industry expects a lot more of us to be cruising, and cruise lines don’t spend nearly $89 billion building ships because they hope somebody eventually shows up.

They’re building them because we keep showing up.

Where Did All These Ships Come From?

One of the funny things about cruising is that the ocean can make the cruise industry seem remarkably small.

We can sail for a day or two and barely see another ship. Every once in a while, one appears on the horizon, we point it out, perhaps try to figure out which ship it is, and then go back to whatever we were doing. With that much ocean around us, it certainly doesn’t feel like we’re running out of room.

Then we arrive in port.

Suddenly there are cruise ships everywhere. One is tied up next to us, another is across the harbor, and perhaps two or three more are arriving behind us. Thousands of people who seemed to have disappeared somewhere out on that enormous ocean are suddenly headed toward the same taxi stand, beach or excursion bus.

Air travel is probably the closest comparison I can think of. Unless you live near an airport or underneath a major flight path, you can look into the sky and rarely notice an airplane. That certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of them flying around. Drive toward a major airport though, and suddenly they’re lined up in the sky waiting to land while others are taxiing toward the runway.

Cruise ships work much the same way, except there’s one rather significant difference. A typical commercial flight might be carrying a couple hundred passengers. A large modern cruise ship can arrive with several thousand. Put four or five of those ships into the same port on the same morning, and we’ve essentially landed dozens of airplanes worth of people in one relatively small place.

Out on the ocean, there seems to be room for everyone, but the traffic jam seems to start when we all try to park in port.

Some Destinations Are Already Saying, “Enough”

This isn’t just a theoretical problem for some of the world’s most popular cruise destinations.

Juneau is one example. The city and cruise lines agreed to limits that started with the 2026 Alaska season. The new limit is 16,000 available lower berths per day, Sunday through Friday and 12,000 on Saturdays. The idea isn’t to eliminate cruise tourism. It’s to find a level that works for residents, local businesses, cruise lines and the people coming to see Alaska.

Santorini has taken its own approach. Its port policy establishes a maximum of 8,000 cruise passengers per day in 2026, with ship calls managed around that capacity. If you’ve ever seen photos of the crowds trying to make their way through the narrow streets of Santorini when several ships are visiting, it isn’t difficult to understand why.

Then there’s Venice, perhaps the most dramatic example of what can happen when cruise tourism and a historic destination collide.

For years, sailing into or out of Venice was part of the experience. Large cruise ships passed through the Venetian Lagoon and along the Giudecca Canal, with one of the world’s most recognizable cities seemingly right outside your balcony. Italy changed that in 2021, restricting large cruise ships from the route past the historic center. Today, larger ships use alternative mainland facilities rather than following the old route through the heart of Venice.

Venice hasn’t disappeared from cruise itineraries. But the way cruise passengers experience Venice has fundamentally changed.

And I suspect we’ll see more destinations wrestling with some version of the same question: How do you welcome cruise tourism without allowing cruise tourism to overwhelm the very thing everyone came to see?

The Ships Aren’t Really the Problem

There is plenty of ocean, and the challenge isn’t finding enough water for another 84 cruise ships to sail through. It’s what happens when those ships all want to visit many of the same places.

A cruise ship can move…Rome can’t. Neither can Juneau, Santorini, Barcelona or most of the Caribbean islands we’ve been visiting for decades.

Unlike a resort that can build another hotel tower when demand increases, many of the world’s most desirable cruise destinations have physical limits. There are only so many docks, buses, taxis, beaches and historic streets, so we’re at a point where the number of visitors begins changing the experience for both the people who live there and the people who traveled thousands of miles to visit.

That’s the part of the cruise industry’s growth that I find much more interesting than simply counting new ships.

Nobody Wants to Visit Paradise With 20,000 of Their Closest Friends

Anyone who has cruised for a while has probably experienced some version of this.

You walk off the ship in the morning and discover that you’re not alone. There are four or five other ships in port, thousands of passengers are pouring toward the same streets, and suddenly that relaxing day you imagined looks a little different.

The taxi line is longer and the beach is now overcrowded. The popular excursion is sold out, while restaurants are packed and whatever quaint little shopping district sits next to the pier suddenly feels a little less quaint.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy involved when cruise passengers complain about cruise passengers. We’re part of the crowd.

I’ve certainly caught myself looking around a busy port and wondering where all these people came from, conveniently forgetting that several thousand of them arrived on the same ship I did. But that’s what makes this such an interesting problem. Cruise passengers want more ships, more choices and more itineraries, but we just don’t necessarily want all those other passengers showing up in the same place on the same day.

Some Cruises Can’t Simply Go Somewhere Else

There are plenty of ports in the world but the problem is that ports aren’t interchangeable.

You don’t book a Mediterranean cruise dreaming of visiting “a port somewhere in Italy.” You may specifically want Rome, Nice, or Venice. Alaska passengers want to experience places like Juneau, Ketchikan and Skagway. A Northern Europe itinerary without some of its marquee cities can become a very different vacation.

Susan and I have reached the stage in our cruising lives where we’re perfectly comfortable staying onboard in some familiar ports, sometimes opting to enjoy a quiet ship is exactly what we want.

But put us somewhere like Rome, Amsterdam or Singapore and that’s a completely different story. No matter how many times we visit these ports, there is always something else to see.

Some destinations are simply too important to the experience and that’s why adding ships isn’t as easy as adding dots to a map.

Is This Why Private Destinations Are Exploding?

The growth of private islands and cruise-line-controlled destinations starts looking a little different when you consider all those new ships.

I’ve written about private island destinations before, and there are plenty of reasons cruise lines love them. They can design the experience around their passengers, control much of the infrastructure and transportation and, of course, they keep a larger portion of passenger spending within their own ecosystem.

But there’s another advantage that may become increasingly important, they create capacity.

If you’re going to build more ships, you need more places capable of handling those ships and their passengers. A destination designed from the beginning around modern cruise volumes is very different from trying to funnel several thousand additional visitors through a centuries-old European city.

Private destinations certainly aren’t going to replace Rome, Juneau or Santorini, but they can take some pressure off traditional ports while giving cruise lines another place to put those increasingly large ships.

Suddenly all that money being invested in private destinations looks less like a collection of beaches and waterparks and more like part of the industry’s long-term infrastructure strategy.

Maybe the Next Great Cruise Port Is Somewhere We Haven’t Considered Yet

This may be the part of all this growth that I find most exciting.

Perhaps the answer isn’t simply more private islands. Maybe cruise growth will push cruise lines, and the rest of us, to expand our definition of what makes a great cruise destination.

We’ve already watched that happen in the Adriatic. Croatia once felt like an alternative to the traditional Mediterranean itinerary. Today, Dubrovnik is firmly established on the cruise map, while Split, Zadar and other Croatian ports regularly appear on itineraries. In just the first half of 2026, foreign cruise ships made 282 journeys into Croatian waters carrying 391,000 passengers, a 13.6% increase in passengers over the same period in 2025.

As places such as Croatia become increasingly popular, cruise lines have an incentive to look farther along the coast and farther around the world. Ports in Montenegro and Albania are appearing on more itineraries, exposing passengers to places many American travelers might never have considered visiting independently.

Then there are places that seem almost improbable when you think of cruise destinations. Moldova has only a tiny connection to the Danube through Giurgiulești, its international port, yet the country is investing in expanding and modernizing the facility as a strategic transportation asset. That doesn’t mean Moldova is about to become the next Cozumel, and its port development is primarily about trade and logistics. But it is a reminder that there are still corners of the map with transportation infrastructure developing in ways that could eventually create new opportunities for tourism as well.

And maybe that’s one of the more exciting possibilities hidden inside those 84 new ships. More ships could mean more congestion in the places we already love. But they could also give cruise lines a reason to develop new itineraries, invest in less familiar ports and introduce us to destinations we might never have considered visiting on our own.

Of course, there is a certain irony to all of this. If enough of us fall in love with the next undiscovered cruise port, eventually we’ll probably complain that there are too many cruise ships there.

Apparently, we’re a difficult group to please.

Bigger Ships Also Need Bigger Places to Park

There’s another piece of the equation that’s easy to overlook.

Not every cruise ship can visit every cruise port.

Ship length, draft, bridge clearance, turning basins and terminal capacity all matter. Some ships have to tender passengers ashore while others simply can’t visit certain destinations. Building a larger ship doesn’t magically create a larger harbor for it to visit.

That could ultimately create a more interesting cruise market rather than a less interesting one.

The largest resort-style ships may increasingly gravitate toward ports and private destinations specifically designed to handle them. Smaller and midsize ships can continue reaching destinations that simply can’t accommodate their much larger cousins.

In other words, those 84 ships don’t necessarily have to compete for exactly the same parking spaces but a lot of their passengers are still going to want to visit many of the same places.

The Part Where We Have to Admit We’re the Problem

It’s tempting to blame cruise lines for overtourism.

They’re building the ships, creating the itineraries and marketing the vacations, but they’re not sailing around empty ships.

We keep booking them.

I’m part of that demand, and if you’re reading a cruise blog called MAK’n Waves, there’s at least a reasonable chance you are too.

That’s why I don’t think the answer is to stop building ships or stop cruising. The more interesting question is whether the industry can continue growing without diminishing the very experiences that made us want to cruise in the first place.

There has to be some balance between giving more people the opportunity to see the world and overwhelming the places they’ve come to see.

And perhaps that means accepting some changes ourselves. Maybe our ship won’t always dock where ships docked 20 years ago and maybe a famous port will limit the number of ships allowed on a particular day. Maybe an itinerary will include a place we’ve never heard of instead of one we expected. Some of those changes may frustrate us while others might lead us somewhere we never knew we wanted to go.

Final Thoughts

So, are we actually running out of places to put all these cruise ships? Probably not.

The world is a very big place, and cruise ships have one rather useful feature: they move.

But we may be reaching the point where we can’t keep sending an ever-growing number of ships to the same relatively small collection of popular destinations and expect the experience to remain unchanged.

The 84 ships currently on order aren’t arriving tomorrow. They’ll enter service gradually through 2039, while older ships retire and the global fleet evolves. Ports will expand and new destinations will emerge, all while private islands continue to grow.

But nearly 230,000 berths worth of new ships still represent an extraordinary amount of future capacity. Those beds need passengers, and those passengers need somewhere to go.

Maybe that’s the part of the cruise industry’s current building boom that deserves more attention. We spend a lot of time talking about what the cruise ships of the future will look like, though I’m becoming equally curious about where they’re going to take us.