Juneau’s 2026 cruise ship tourism season came to a close last week. The final ship, the Norwegian Encore, left Tuesday last week. Juneau saw the most passengers it’s ever seen in a single season — more than 1.7 million people.
KTOO’s Clarise Larson sat down with the city’s visitor industry director, Alix Pierce, to hear more about how the record-breaking summer went.
Listen here:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Clarise Larson: So tell me about this year’s season and how you think it went.
Alix Pierce: Overall, I think things went pretty well. We had a fully functional glacier, at least at the new normal of reduced staffing capacity. That was a big change from last year, as people may recall. That was our big kind of panic issue. (We) definitely had more visitors riding the city bus this year, and that’s an issue that we’ll continue to watch as the industry has evolved. The way that people get around and the way that people communicate has evolved. We’re seeing more rental cars. We’re seeing a lot more rideshare – Uber, Lyft-type transportation, and it’s changed the way that visitors interact with the community a little bit.
We finished the season with 1,733,016 passengers, and I think the interesting piece of that story is that ships were sailing at really high capacity — that’s 104% of our capacity. So that’s interesting that they were so full. And so we had a really high-capacity year. It was about 2% growth over last year, and that’s also kind of within the realm of normal fluctuation, as we’ve been stable between 2023 — and we’re projected to kind of be stable — through 2028.
Clarise Larson: I wanted to speak briefly about the Gold Belt Trams’ unexpected closure and how you think that might have changed the dynamic of the season.
Alix Pierce: I think it had a direct impact on the number of people who took the bus to the glacier. That’s probably the big thing, like, ‘Oh God, we can’t go to the tram. Well, what do we do? Oh, I read on a cruise blog that I can get on the city bus, even though all the bookings are sold out on shuttles.’ That kind of thing. I think maybe downtown was a little bit busier, but that was certainly a factor in the season. I mean, the tram is, like, one of our top two biggest attractions. I couldn’t say whether that or the [Mendenhall] Glacier sees more passengers, but it did have a pretty major impact. Probably also had an impact on the people renting cars, taking Ubers, Lyfts, Turo’s, just trying to find other things to do.
Clarise Larson: Can you speak to what people should keep an eye on for the 2027 season and future seasons?
Alix Pierce: The 2027 season will be pretty status quo. I’m actually very excited about it being status quo because we’re going to use that season to do a bunch of data collection to try to get a baseline sense of how things are operating now. A lot of it’s data that we already have, but creating a dashboard, putting it all in the same place — that’s work that the Visitor Industry Task Force is doing right now to kind of figuring out what we should be looking at and how we should be using those indicators.
We want to be able to measure that and see how those changes have affected things. Hopefully, we’ll have a tram next year, so that will help. So it’s an exciting opportunity to be able to look at kind of our baseline data now that we’ve had a few seasons that are steady and stable in terms of our numbers, and then be able to, in the future as things change, evaluate those changes.
