Busy Alaska Port Green Lights a Fifth Cruise Ship Dock
Juneau, one of Alaska’s busiest cruise ports that has taken steps to limit the impact of cruising on local lifestyle and environment, has agreed to the development of a fifth cruise ship dock in the city’s downtown area.
The decision by the Juneau Assembly on April 7, 2025 enables the Huna Totem Corporation to get started on the project, which will include one dock, retail space and a welcome center, and a culture and science center.
The go-ahead for a new cruise dock comes on the heels of a new citizen petition that would ban medium and large cruise ships from calling at Juneau before May 1 and after September 30, although the petitioner does not attach specific ship sizes in the document.
The petition also asks Juneau voters to set an annual limit of cruise arrivals at 1.5 million, which is significantly less than the 1.6 million-plus that visited in 2024. It is not known when the petition will be filed with the city, or voted on.
The Huna Totem project, green-lighted by the city’s planning commission in 2023, has some stipulations.
The new dock will only accommodate ships with passenger capacity up to 4,400 in double occupancy, and the berthing schedule must adhere to Juneau’s regulation that allows only five ships to visit simultaneously across all of the ship city’s docks.
The guest capacity limit is not likely to affect most of the ships that sail Alaska waters during the summer season. Ships slated to call at Juneau in 2025, for example, include Celebrity Cruises’ Celebrity Solstice, with capacity for 2,852 guests; Princess Cruises’ Grand Princess, with 2,600 guests; and Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Jade, with 2,402.
Huna Totem owns the space where the development will rise. The land was donated to the local corporation by Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings (NCLH) in 2022, with the understanding that Huna Totem would build a cruise pier and provide NCLH’s cruise brands with preferential berthing rights once completed.
The new cruise dock will be at a downtown location on Egan Drive, adjacent to Juneau’s US Coast Guard Station.
Technically, the Juneau Assembly vote did not directly address the development; it agreed to an ordinance creating a 35-year tidelands lease that allows the dock to be built on what is submerged lands in the Gastineau Channel owned by the city of Juneau.
The cruise dock and related spaces will be called Aak’w Landing, and are scheduled to be developed in three phases. Phase One includes the construction of the dock, an underground parking area, the retail space, and a welcome center, all due for completion by the 2026 summer season.
Phase Two adds more retail space and an upper-level plaza, set to open by the 2027 season, and Phase Three completes the project with the building of the Indigenous Knowledge, Science and Cultural Learning Center. Phase Three does not yet have a completion date.
Juneau Joins Another Port in Dock Expansion
Juneau is not the only Alaska port that has agreed to expand the number of cruise ship docks. In Seward, port officials in February 2025 obtained legislative approval enabling it to build a new two-berth dock and a cruise terminal.
Seward is considerably smaller than Juneau and welcomes about 100 cruise ship calls per year versus Juneau’s 500. However, it is a growing port with an existing dock and terminal that were built in the 1960s.
Legislation now allows the port owner, Alaska Railroad Corporation, to issue the necessary bonds to construct the $137 million project. Once completed, the Seward facility will have a 68,000-square-foot terminal and a 750-foot, two-berth floating dock.
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While Juneau is enabling its new dock to move forward, it has also moved to rein in its cruise-tourism market.
In 2024, Juneau and Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) agreed to set a limit of 16,000 cruise arrivals per day, dropping to 12,000, on Saturdays. Also in 2024, the city’s limit of hosting no more than five cruise ships per day went into effect.
Some local residents believed that these efforts did not go far enough and put forward a citizen petition to suspend all cruise ship calls on Saturdays. However, voters in the October 2024 municipal election put the kibosh on that idea, voting down the measure by a margin of 60%.