Cruise ship season wrapped up Sunday in Seattle, with close to 1 million people boarding a cruise ship in 2026, a record number, according to the Port of Seattle.
Moving these floating resorts through the sea can have big impacts – from hitting whales to heating the planet. Cruise lines say they're working to do less harm.
Most Seattle cruises head up the Inside Passage along the wild, rainforest coasts of British Columbia and Alaska.
Another 700,000 passengers boarded Alaska cruises from Vancouver, British Columbia.
The coastal mountain scenery and wildlife are big draws for customers.
"We were lucky to see whales, orca, sea lions," cruise ship passenger Patricia from the Caribbean island of Martinique said at Seattle's busy Smith Cove Cruise Terminal after her seven-day cruise on the MSC Poesia. She declined to give her last name.
"If we want to go and see Alaska, we must take a boat," she said.
Nearly two-thirds of summer visitors to Alaska arrive by cruise ship, according to the Cruise Lines International Association.
Alaska cruises are big business. The Port of Seattle says the ships bring more than $1 billion in economic benefits annually to Washington state.
Critics say such estimates are exaggerations that exclude the harm the ships do locally and globally.
Whales vs. ships
Sometimes on the Inside Passage, tourism and nature collide, and not in a good way.
In September, the Norwegian Joy, a cruise ship sailing from Seattle, steamed into Sitka, Alaska, with some unusual cargo draped across its bow: the carcass of an endangered fin whale the ship had hit.
"Quite sad, when you think about what we're all here for," Scottish passenger Lee Page, on his first trip to Alaska, told public radio station KCAW on the docks in Sitka.
The ship stopped two miles from port to wait for a tugboat to remove the carcass.
"There was an announcement this morning from the captain just saying that there's an issue with a whale at the front of the ship, and that it was going to be inspected by local authorities," Page said.
In June, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship pulled into Seward, Alaska, with a dead, pregnant fin whale on its bow.
Cruise lines want to avoid hitting whales, even if only for the delays and distress it brings to their passengers.
"Thousands of whales are killed as a result of collisions with vessels every year," said marine mammal observer Maria Snell on board the MSC Poesia.
European cruise line MSC brought Snell aboard the Poesia for a month to study how whales react to cruise ships and come up with new tactics for avoiding collisions. Snell works for a UK conservation charity called ORCA.
"There's still quite a big gap in our knowledge in terms of how whales actually behave around a large vessel," Snell said.
MSC started Seattle-to-Alaska cruises in 2026, contributing to the Port of Seattle's record-breaking cruise volume. The Geneva-based cruise line, the world's third largest, invited reporters aboard the Poesia while it was docked in Seattle between cruises.
Marine mammal experts say most collisions go unreported, or even unnoticed, by the giant ships that hit whales.
Speed is a big factor. The Poesia can go 20 knots (23 miles per hour). Larger cruise ships can do 25 miles per hour.
Speed can be important for passengers to have time to visit multiple destinations, one of the main attractions of cruise-ship travel.
"Vessels do have a schedule to stick to, and so in some instances they do need to be going quite fast to get to where they need to be on time," Snell said.
Snell said, on the cruise she had just completed, the Poesia found itself surrounded by at least 10 orcas at one point and had close calls with a humpback and a fin whale, where the ship had to slow down and change course to avoid the whales.
"I think the cruise ships do all they can to lessen their impact on the environment," Poesia passenger Patricia said.
Cruise lines say their ships obey all speed limits, even voluntary ones. Their crews are trained to slow down if they see a whale.
Still, in 2024, an MSC cruise to Bermuda returned to New York's Brooklyn Cruise Terminal with an endangered sei whale wrapped across its bow. A necropsy determined that the ship strike had killed the 44-foot-long female.
Most of the Inside Passage doesn't have speed limits.
A few places near the ports of Seattle and Vancouver have voluntary speed limits to protect whales, especially from ship noise. The Quiet Sound initiative in Washington and the ECHO initiative in British Columbia ask cruise ships to slow to 14.5 knots (17 miles per hour).
About 85% of cruise ships respect those limits, a better participation rate than cargo ships, which are also asked to slow down for whales.
"Studies have shown that 10-knot speed limits are the most effective in reducing risk of vessel strike mortality and serious injury of large whales," according to the Marine Mammal Commission, an independent federal agency.
Environmental activists urge mandatory speed limits, not just to protect whales but to tackle another major impact of cruise ships: their energy consumption.
"Leave the speed to endangered fin whales," Center for Biological Diversity attorney Catherine Kilduff said by email. "They're called the 'greyhound of the sea' because they're the fastest whales in the ocean. Not one of them should ever be killed by a ship."
Tackling planetary pollution
For those who have never been on one, cruise ships' size can be mind-blowing, even a mid-sized one like the Poesia.
It carries about 3,000 passengers and 1,000 crew.
The Poesia's many entertainment features include three swimming pools and a 1,200-seat theater.
All those amenities give passengers lots of things to do. They also add to the ships' size, weight, and fuel consumption.
"I think most people are unaware of how massively harmful these ships are," said Elizabeth Burton, a retired mathematician and anti-cruise ship activist with Seattle Cruise Control.
"They're really bad for the climate. They emit air pollution and water pollution. They're a public health menace. Yeah, I'll stop there," she said.
Passengers and anyone who sees cruise ship marketing can get the impression that cruising is environmentally friendly.
"Cruise lines are leading the way toward a more sustainable future," according to the Cruise Lines International Association.
During the six-month cruise season, Seattle-based cruises put out as much climate pollution as the entire city of Seattle, according to a report from Seattle Cruise Control.
Their tally includes the ships' own fossil-fuel burning and that of passengers flying to Seattle for their cruise.
Cruise lines say they've been investing heavily in new ships that can run on clean or conventional fuels and burn less fuel altogether.
The industry currently relies primarily on a thick, tar-like fuel called heavy fuel oil. Ships are required to use scrubbers to clean up the thick exhaust from burning the heavy fuel. The scrubbers divert pollutants into the sea.
Under a voluntary agreement between cruise lines and Washington state, cruise ships are effectively banned from using the heavy fuel in state waters.
Coppell said MSC has stopped burning heavy fuel oil anywhere on the Inside Passage in favor of a diesel-like petroleum fuel called marine gas oil that does not require scrubbers.
"We chose to use marine gas oil here because it means that it burns much cleaner," Coppell said.
Truly clean fuels are practically non-existent at the scale needed by cruise ships. A large cruise ship can burn up to 250 tons of fuel, or roughly 80,000 gallons, per day, according to the University of Colorado.
Cruise lines say they aim to adopt cleaner fuels as they become available.
"As an industry, we've set pretty ambitious targets, for an industry that's very fuel-dependent," said Linden Coppell, MSC Cruises' vice president in charge of sustainability.
Coppell said MSC's newer ships can run on liquefied natural gas or petroleum fuels.
Liquefied natural gas lowers local pollution impacts on nearby communities, but studies show that it offers little, if any, climate benefit over other fossil fuels, due to leaks of unburned methane, a climate superpollutant, when producing and using natural gas.
As the cruise industry grows, so do its climate impacts.
The Port of Seattle aims to halve the climate impacts of its maritime sector, including cargo and cruise ships, by 2030. It is not on track to meet that target, as emissions continue to increase.
"Cleaner fuels and vessel technology are not available or affordable at scale," a Sept. 2026 draft report from the port concluded.
The cruise industry and the Port of Seattle both aim to be carbon-neutral by 2050.
"That's too late. The world is already in crisis from the changing climate," activist Elizabeth Burton said. "So if they can't sail their ships on zero-emissions fuels now, the way to reduce their emissions is to reduce the number of ships. Just do fewer sailings. We think that's an entirely reasonable goal."
Northwest ports and cruise lines announced a "green cruise corridor" to Alaska in 2022 to look into adopting less-polluting fuels.
In October 2026, the green-corridor group finished its first feasibility study, of a fuel called green methanol.
The study finds that switching cruise ships to the new fuel is technically feasible but would be difficult and expensive, especially given federal opposition to clean energy under the Trump administration.
Passengers might have to pay an extra $400 each to cruise the Inside Passage in a climate-friendly way.
Copyright 2026 KUOW
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
