Why these Alaska companies that rely on cruises want limits to ships

Visitors who rush around Juneau, Alaska, the passages in the Caribou can look like any other gift shop in the seasonal tourist city.

To its owner, Laura McDonnell, the 28 -year -old storefront means so much more.

McDonnell works at Caribou Crossings for 25 years, from 16 years old. She said that she “had grown up in this small store”, staying in high school and college before finally buying the company in January 2020.

She remembers having held one of her current employees as a baby. When she entered labor, her obstetric nurse had been a previous employee, working at the gift shop to pretend a nursing school.

It is a “tourist love story in typical Alaska” – and all this thanks to the flooding cruise industry of Juneau, whose passengers represent 98% of the store’s income, according to McDonnell.

Like many local businesses, cruisers are essential for the health of Caribou Crossings. However, its owner supports the recent limits of the city on the holiday industry at sea – and it is not alone.

“The southeast of Alaska is a difficult place to live, and those of us live here because it is beautiful and because of the lifestyle that he offers,” Alexandra Pierce, director of the Juneau visitors industry, told Business Insider. “People in the visitors industry, including me, are the premises first, and the protection of this balance in our communities is really important for us.”

Juneau is the most frequented cruise center in the state. The Senator of the State of Alaska, Jesse Kiehl, told Bi that the city had only seen 170,000 non -recurrent visitors in 2024. It is a drop in the bucket – or snowflake on Denali – compared to the record of 1.73 million ships who visited last year – a 33% study of the city of 2019 before the Pandemi -19 commanded by the city.

If growth continues at this rate, it could be a windfall for local businesses such as caribou level crossings.

According to the Juneau study, the cruise industry nourished $ 375 million in the city’s economy in 2023. Most of this came from direct spending of passengers, because the Serein Hutchinson, the director general of the tour operator Juneau Tours, can testify.

“These cruise companies coming to Juneau are perhaps the major companies, but they benefit local businesses,” she told BI, noting that 95% of her business customers are cruising passengers.

However, like McDonnell, Hutchinson supports the implementation by Juneau of a ceiling of five ships per day in 2024 and 16,000 cruise passenger per day (12,000 Saturday) in 2026. The limits, negotiated with the cruise industry, should maintain the volume of cruise visitors for this year and next year.

For McDonnell, it is a worthy compromise. “We have to manage the tourists we have before talking about growth,” she said.

Self-imposed restrictions may seem countertestive for foreigners: these floating stations and their passengers are consecutive to most means of subsistence in the capital of Alaska. A boom is stimulated by the visitors to local operation, a limited list of which includes gift shops, helicopter visits, whale observation boats and excursions to the glacier near Mendenhall.

“Without this economic bright point, the region would be a different place and more in difficulty,” said Pierce.

However, for residents like Holly Johnson – the 52 -year -old marketing director of Tour Operator Wings Airways and the Taku Glacier Lodge – These caps are an “ideal point”.

About 85% of his business customers are cruising passengers. However, it also supports restrictions, describing them as “very common sense of what Juneau needs and what is happening in industry, in terms of growth”.

Without them, the boom of sea vacation could have become more and more overwhelming for the city – enthusiastic not by demand (which apparently seems endless) but by the local infrastructure.

Like the other cities in the grip of cruises, because cruises have exploded, local dissatisfaction has the same.

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In the survey of the 501 residents of Juneau at the end of 2024, 20% of respondents said that the limitation of the cruise volume should be the largest priority in the city – up 5% compared to 2023.

The days when the city of 31,555 people is criticized with 17,000 cruisers, residents complained about traffic, noise, excessive networks of whale observation boats, abandoned cell reception, slower WiFi and even bears in search of waste visitors.

“We must also cross these streets every day,” said the owner of Caribou Crossings. “We know what it is to live here with passengers from cruise ships.”