Juneau’s first cruise ship of the year arrived Monday afternoon.
It marks the kickoff of the 2026 cruise ship season. Juneau is expected to see about 1.69 million passengers arriving on ships between now and Oct. 6, when the season ends.
Sarah Wong was one of the more than 2,000 passengers on the MS Eurodam who walked off the ship and onto the Juneau seawalk on Monday. She’s visiting from San Diego and said it’s her first time taking a cruise to Alaska. She said she’s stoked to finally check Juneau and the Mendenhall Glacier off the bucket list. And she’s grateful to the community.
“Thank you for hosting the ships. I know that’s not always a good thing, but we are very, very grateful that we’re able to come in and hopefully generate some income for the town, too,” she said.
City officials say this cruise season should feel much steadier than previous years. It’s the first year that Juneau is implementing a cap on the number of daily passengers that come off cruise ships: 16,000 people on most days and 12,000 people on Saturdays – limits that were negotiated with cruise lines. In previous seasons, Juneau could see up to 21,000 visitors on its busiest days.
The goal of the cap is to provide some stability to residents while both curbing future growth and protecting local businesses that rely on the industry. Though some residents think it’s all for show.
Jo Wulffenstein is a sales representative for Alaska Tour Sales and was selling tours on the seawalk on Monday afternoon. She’s a year-round resident who has worked in the industry in Juneau for nearly two decades, and she’s supportive of the negotiated cap and what it will mean for residents and the environment.
“I wholeheartedly believe in the compromise of preserving our city, our livelihood, and making sure there’s a happy medium,” she said. “So if it means that I make a little bit less money, I’m okay with that. Like, I want to take care of my town and my surroundings and what makes it so beautiful here.”
Juneau’s most visited tourist attraction, the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center, is also starting the season off with a more reliable schedule than last year. It will be open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. starting May 1. Those are slightly reduced hours compared to two years ago, before the Trump Administration cut thousands of federal jobs across the nation.
But it’s an improvement over last year’s season, which was tangled with uncertainty after the federal job cuts left the visitor center with minimal staff.
Six more ships are scheduled to arrive this week as the season gradually picks up. By next week, that number will double.
