For three years New Zealand's cruise ambition has been a single line: "more than 4,000 port visits by 2036." You cannot argue with a line. So we have published the thing you can argue with — an interactive timetable of all 4,000 modelled calls, dated across a full year, port by port and ship by ship.
What it is
Four thousand individual cruise calls, 1 July 2036 to 30 June 2037, across 20 ports and destinations. You can filter by port, month, cruise line, call type and vessel basis, sort any column, and export the full set — or any filtered view — to CSV in one click.
It is a theoretical scenario, not a schedule. No row is a booking, an itinerary or a commitment from any cruise line. It exists to make a number tangible, and to stress-test it.
The honesty column
The part that matters most is the vessel-basis tag on every single call:
- 68% (2,718 calls) use ships in service today
- 23% (914) use vessels already announced or on order
- 9% (368) use explicitly fictional Cruisey concept vessels — names like Aotearoa Explorer and Te Moana, invented precisely so they can't be mistaken for real deployments
Two in three calls use real ships that sail now. Fewer than one in ten are invented. Nobody has committed any ship to any of these calls, and the timetable says so on every line. That is the difference between a scenario and a fabrication.
Why publish a fake timetable in full
Because a scenario you can pull apart in a spreadsheet is worth more than a headline you have to take on trust. The capacity analysis behind the timetable already found that 4,000 does not fit today's berths — the network caps around 3,351 now, and reaches about 3,935 only if every consented berth is built and the season is flattened. So read the timetable as the built-out target scenario: what a successful 2036 looks like after the infrastructure programme is delivered, not what today's ports could absorb.
Filter it to Tauranga and you can watch a single berth fill day after day through summer. Filter to July and you see the deliberately thin ~5% winter programme, confined to four northern ports. Filter to "Fictional" and you see exactly which calls rest on vessels that don't yet exist. That transparency is the entire point of building it.
The invitation
You cannot argue about a number, but you can argue about a schedule: this port is too small, that ship is too big, this week is too crowded, that line would never come here. That argument is the value of the exercise. It is also how the 4,000 target stops being a slogan and becomes a plan someone can actually deliver.
Open it, break it, and tell us where. We will change it and republish.