I am very curious about the future of boutique, smaller excursion cruises in the Arctic. In the winters I work on a small-ish (120 pax) ship conducting excursions (for a huge price tag) in Antarctica, and in the summer the ship does cruises around Greenland, Svalbard, and the Canadian Arctic. They have not begun coming towards Alaska/ the Northwest passage, though I believe it is only a matter of time.
There is potential for a myriad of issues with these cruises. Antarctica, in a way, is a bit simpler for me, as there are no communities being visited. It is so, so incredibly important to have the ‘land support’ for these cruise lines be community led when they start inevitably arriving in Alaska. To use a community of people as an ‘experience’ on an expedition has huge consequence, especially when the guides are have only read about the culture and do not have hands-on knowledge. If a town/ village isn’t set up to receive hundreds of passengers and host their needs, I think it possible, if not probable, that the cruise lines could create their own guided land tours and money would not go into local pockets. Additionally, the communities these ships are looking to visit are not yet set up to receive them on a bigger scale. I spend a good amount of time in Nome, and have chatted with people who were involved in the first few cruises coming to port. The townspeople showing them around were teachers, parents, and working citizens. Though the trips went off with a bang, this is not sustainable if multiple ships per week begin visiting, which I believe they will as quickly the case as nearly every cruise is at capacity. People are willing to pay an enormous price to visit these remote parts of the world, but in order to be sustainable there needs to be such strong community support and desire to have them in port.
It’s really cool that you have some firsthand experience with this topic to draw on for your post! You echoed some of the same concerns that I had about cruise ships coming to Arctic communities. I did not think about the fact that depending on the infrastructure, cruise lines could just make their own excursions and thereby bring zero benefit to the communities they visit. A sobering thought, as most people assume that this type of venture would offer locals at least some benefit.