Three figures turn up again and again in New Zealand cruise commentary — in strategy papers, media coverage and industry submissions — and all three are being used incorrectly. The "660 calls" is attributed to the wrong season. "Alaska's 4,911 port calls" is not a port-call count at all. And the "$1.37 billion" everyone quotes is a year out of date. These are the numbers the entire 2036 case is built on, so getting them right is not pedantry. It is the difference between an argument that holds and one a hostile reader dismantles in an afternoon.
This is a companion to Cruisey's evidence paper, New Zealand vs Alaska: What Cruise Scale Really Looks Like.
1. The 660-call figure is a season out
The figure of "around 660 port calls" is real, but it belongs to 2025-26, not 2026-27. Three independent sources place approximately 660 at 2025-26. The New Zealand Cruise Association's preliminary data for 2026-27, released in May 2026, reports only a further 3% decline on that season, with the Association's chief executive noting numbers are "starting to plateau."
Cruisey used the wrong season for this figure in an earlier paper, and has corrected it in public rather than quietly. It is one season and about twenty calls — but it is the baseline the whole 2036 argument rests on, so it needs to be right.
2. "Alaska has 4,911 port calls" — it doesn't
This is the most widely repeated Alaska comparison in New Zealand cruise commentary, usually set against New Zealand's ~660 to produce a satisfying seven-to-one ratio. Cruisey interrogated the source directly. The 4,911 figure is the unfiltered record count of CLIA's Alaska Port Schedule for the 2025 season — and those records include Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, San Diego and San Francisco, none of which are in Alaska, plus Glacier Bay, Tracy Arm and Hubbard Glacier, which are not ports at all. There is no published methodology anywhere on the page.
Worse for the ratio: no organisation publishes an Alaska port-call count on the basis New Zealand uses. The honest comparison is not a ratio at all. Alaska's cruise volume lands not on the state's 738,737 residents but on Southeast Alaska: 70,613 people. Skagway, population 1,123, handled 1.36 million cruise passenger visits in 2025 — more than the whole of New Zealand, several times over. That is a far stronger answer to "New Zealand is full" than a ratio built on a number that measures the wrong thing.
3. The $1.37 billion figure is last year's
New Zealand cruise is routinely described as worth NZ$1.37 billion and 9,729 jobs. Those are the 2023-24 figures. CLIA and the New Zealand Cruise Association published the 2024-25 study on 9 December 2025: NZ$1.23 billion in total output, down 9.8%, and 8,253 jobs, down 15.3%.
The more useful line in that newer study is the one almost nobody quotes: average passenger spend per day ashore rose from NZ$282.20 to NZ$313 — an 11% increase while volume fell nearly a fifth. Fewer passengers, each worth more. That is a genuine "higher-value" story sitting unused in current-year data, while the sector keeps citing last year's headline.
Why this matters
A sector that quotes the wrong numbers loses arguments to anyone who checks — and cruise lines, ministers and journalists all check. The value Cruisey adds is not louder advocacy. It is being the publication that audits the numbers everyone else repeats, corrects itself in public when it is wrong, and states plainly where the data does not yet exist.
That is what makes the case defensible. The full reconciled figures, with every source and date, sit behind the Future of Cruise strategy.
Sources: New Zealand Cruise Association data via Newswire (August 2026) and Newstalk ZB (May 2026); CLIA/AEC Group cruise economic impact studies for 2023-24 (November 2024) and 2024-25 (9 December 2025); CLIA Alaska Port Schedule, interrogated 3 September 2026; Alaska Department of Commerce Commercial Passenger Vessel Tax Report 2016-2025; Rain Coast Data for Southeast Conference, 2025. Where a figure could not be verified from a published source, Cruisey says so rather than estimating.