We built the 2036/37 calendar as an allocation model rather than writing about one. On current berth capacity the network tops out at about 3,351 port visits. Build every consented berth and flatten the season and it reaches 3,935. The 4,000 ambition is reachable — but only at the ceiling of what the network can physically absorb.
We built the 2036/37 calendar as an actual allocation model rather than writing about one — nineteen ports, twelve months, checked against every port's published berth count. On New Zealand's current berth capacity, the network tops out at about 3,351 port visits, not 4,000. Adding the berths already consented or under construction, and flattening the season, gets to 3,935 — still short. The 4,000 ambition is not impossible. But it sits at the absolute ceiling of what the network can physically absorb, and it requires both new berth capacity and a materially flatter season. Neither alone is enough.
This is a scenario model, not a forecast. Every constraint is a stated Cruisey assumption. The full dataset is published alongside this paper.
Why we modelled it instead of describing it
Cruisey has argued for more than 4,000 annual New Zealand port visits by 2036. Until now we had not tested whether the number fits.
A target of that kind is easy to publish and hard to defend, because the obvious challenge — where exactly would those ships go, and on what day? — has no answer unless somebody does the allocation. So we did it: every port with a published capability, every month, checked against berth-days.
The result is more useful than the target was, and less comfortable. New Zealand's peak season is already close to physically full at several ports, and the constraint arrives well before 4,000.
We are publishing the model, its assumptions and its dataset so that anyone can dismantle it. That is the point of it.
What the model does
Definition. One port visit is one cruise vessel at one New Zealand port on one calendar day. Scenic cruising is recorded separately and excluded. Turnaround calls count once.
Nineteen ports, each with its published maximum length overall, cruise berth count and berth-or-tender status. Sources are in our port network paper and the underlying evidence base.
Twelve months, weighted to a proposed seasonal shape and shaped against the only published proxy available — Tauranga's forward schedule for 2026-27, in which January and February together are 52% of the season.
Two constraints, and it matters which is which:
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A destination-capability ceiling per port. This is a Cruisey assumption, not a published figure — a judgment about excursion inventory, coach supply and town absorption at maturity. It is the softer constraint and the more arguable one.
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A physical berth-day check. Calls in a month cannot exceed berths multiplied by days in that month. Tender-only ports are capped at one vessel a day. This is arithmetic on published berth counts, and it is the constraint that actually bites.
Ships are described by class, not by name. We have deliberately not populated this calendar with vessel names. Inventing plausible ships and attaching them to real cruise lines produces material that gets screenshotted and reported as deployment news, and no caveat travels with a screenshot. The calendar is an allocation of capacity, not a fleet list.
Scenario A: what New Zealand can absorb today
Current berths. The 65 / 30 / 5 seasonal shape.
Result: 3,351 port visits.
| Period | Visits | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Peak (Dec–Mar) | 2,140 | 63.9% |
| Shoulder (Oct–Nov, Apr–May) | 1,141 | 34.0% |
| Winter (Jun–Sep) | 70 | 2.1% |
| Total | 3,351 |
| Tier | Visits | Share |
|---|---|---|
| A — gateways and large-ship anchors | 1,209 | 36.1% |
| B — scale-ready growth ports | 978 | 29.2% |
| C — high-value regional | 846 | 25.2% |
| D — boutique and expedition | 318 | 9.5% |
Four main gateways: 36.1%. Rest of the network: 63.9% — comfortably beyond the 50% dispersal ambition, which is genuinely encouraging.
Where it breaks
The model flagged twenty port-months where the allocation exceeded physical berth-days and had to be capped:
| Port | Berths | Months capped | What the cap means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tauranga | 1 | Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr | Six months at 100% berth occupancy — a ship every single day |
| Auckland | 2 | Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar | Four months at both berths occupied every day |
| Lyttelton | 1 | Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar | Four months of continuous single-berth occupancy |
| Bay of Islands | 0 (tender) | Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar | Four months of daily tender operations |
| Wellington | 2 | Feb | |
| Nelson | 1 | Feb |
Read the Tauranga row again. To reach 3,351 nationally, Tauranga has to run a cruise ship every day for six consecutive months on one berth. That is not a stretch target. It is a physical impossibility once you allow for weather, maintenance, non-cruise vessels and turnaround time.
This is the real finding. New Zealand's constraint is not demand, deployment or even cost. In a high-volume scenario it is berths at four specific ports in four specific months.
Scenario B: flatten the season, keep the berths
Same berths. Season reshaped to 54 / 41 / 5 — pushing volume out of January and February into October, November, April and May.
Result: 3,470 port visits. An improvement of 119.
That is a striking result and worth dwelling on. Flattening the season — the change most often proposed as the answer to peak congestion — adds barely 3.5% to national capacity on its own, and increases the number of capped port-months from 20 to 23.
The reason is structural. Spreading the peak relieves January and February, but October, November and April then hit the same single-berth ceiling at the same ports. You cannot flatten your way past a berth count of one.
Scenario C: build the berths, keep the peak
Adds the capacity already consented, under construction, or plausibly available:
- Auckland — Bledisloe North, the 330-metre wharf consented under the Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 and targeting March 2027, taking Auckland to three cruise berths and raising its length limit
- Tauranga — a second berth via the Stella Passage development
- Lyttelton — Te Awaparahi Bay freeing existing berths for cruise from 2031
- Bay of Islands — a second ISPS-compliant tender pier
- Napier — higher destination ceiling on its existing three berths
Result: 3,795 port visits. Capped port-months fall from 20 to 12.
Gateway concentration rises to 42.2%, because the new capacity is at gateways. That is a trade-off worth naming: building berths where they are physically needed pushes against the dispersal objective.
Scenario D: build the berths and flatten the season
Result: 3,935 port visits. Capped port-months fall to 7.
| Peak | Shoulder | Winter | Gateways | Capped months | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Current berths, current shape | 63.9% | 34.0% | 2.1% | 36.1% | 20 |
| B. Current berths, flattened | 54.0% | 44.0% | 2.0% | 37.3% | 23 |
| C. New berths, current shape | 65.2% | 32.6% | 2.1% | 42.2% | 12 |
| D. New berths, flattened | 54.6% | 43.5% | 1.9% | 43.4% | 7 |
| Port visits | |
|---|---|
| A. Current berths, current shape | 3,351 |
| B. Current berths, flattened | 3,470 |
| C. New berths, current shape | 3,795 |
| D. New berths, flattened | 3,935 |
What this means for the 4,000 target
Doing both things — building every berth currently in prospect and moving nearly ten percentage points of volume out of the peak — reaches 3,935. Ninety-eight per cent of the target, and still short of it.
And that is with destination-capability ceilings we set generously. Tauranga at 430 visits a season. Auckland at 620. Bay of Islands at 300 from 47 scheduled in 2025-26.
Three honest conclusions follow.
The 4,000 ambition is at the ceiling of the network, not comfortably inside it. It is reachable, but only with essentially everything going right: the consented berths built, a materially flatter season, and destination capacity at every port well beyond anything achieved to date.
Neither berths nor seasonality alone gets there. Berths add 444 visits. Flattening adds 119. Together they add 584 — more than the sum of the parts, because they unlock each other. Anyone proposing one without the other is proposing about half a solution.
Winter is not the answer. In every scenario winter contributes about 2%, well under the 5% we previously proposed, because only four northern ports are modelled as winter-capable and their destination ceilings bind long before their berths do. Winter cruising is a real opportunity for four ports. It is not a national capacity lever.
We are attaching a condition to it that was not there before: it requires the consented berth programme to complete and the season to flatten by roughly ten percentage points. Published without those conditions, it was a number. With them, it is a plan.
What the calendar looks like
The full dataset is published as a spreadsheet alongside this paper, port by port and month by month, for both the current-capacity and with-investment scenarios. A sample of Scenario A:
| Port | Berths | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Winter | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auckland | 2 | 41 | 44 | 62 | 62 | 56 | 62 | 47 | 33 | 27 | 434 |
| Port Chalmers | 3 | 24 | 25 | 41 | 60 | 58 | 46 | 27 | 19 | 0 | 300 |
| Wellington | 2 | 25 | 27 | 40 | 58 | 56 | 45 | 28 | 20 | 0 | 299 |
| Tauranga | 1 | 30 | 30 | 31 | 31 | 28 | 31 | 30 | 24 | 20 | 255 |
| Lyttelton | 1 | 25 | 27 | 31 | 31 | 28 | 31 | 28 | 20 | 0 | 221 |
The bold figures are the caps — months where the port is at 100% berth occupancy every single day. Four of these five ports are running at their physical ceiling for a third of the year.
Scenic cruising is recorded separately and excluded from the totals: Fiordland 340 entries, Marlborough Sounds 60, subantarctic 45. Counting these inside a port-visit total is precisely the error we identified in CLIA's Alaska schedule, and we are not repeating it.
What we got wrong, and what we still do not know
We previously implied 4,000 was a deployment problem. The model says the binding constraint is berths at four ports in four months. That is a capital-works problem with a lead time measured in years, and it should be sequenced ahead of deployment advocacy rather than alongside it.
Our 5% winter share does not survive. The model produces about 2% in every scenario.
The destination ceilings are the weakest part of this model, and they are ours. No New Zealand port publishes excursion capacity — how many guests can actually be sold a quality experience on a given day. That number is more important than berth count for every Tier C and D port, and it does not exist anywhere. This is the most valuable dataset New Zealand does not have.
Berth-days overstate real capacity. The physical check assumes a port can accept a ship every day of the month. Real availability is lower once weather, maintenance, non-cruise vessels and turnaround windows are allowed for. The true ceilings are below the ones modelled here, which means all four scenarios are optimistic.
No lost-call rates are published. Tender-dependent ports — Bay of Islands, Akaroa, Kaikōura — will lose calls to weather, and nobody publishes how many.
What we are asking
Ports: tell us your real monthly ceiling. Not berth-days — the number of cruise days a month you can genuinely accept, allowing for everything else. If our ceiling for your port is wrong, send the right one and we will re-run the model and publish the change.
Publish excursion capacity. It is the missing constraint in this model and in every port's own planning. Without it, both we and the ports are guessing at the number that matters most.
Sequence the berth programme against the target. If 4,000 needs Bledisloe North, a second Tauranga berth, cruise access at Te Awaparahi Bay and a second Bay of Islands tender pier, then those are the 2036 programme — not a wish list beside it.
Treat the seasonal shift as capital policy, not marketing. Moving ten points of volume out of the peak is worth 119 visits on its own and 584 when combined with berths. It is not a promotional campaign; it is a deployment negotiation conducted three years ahead of each season.
Take the model apart. The assumptions and the dataset are published. Every constraint is stated and every one is arguable. If it is wrong, we would rather know now than after the target has been quoted in a select committee.
Method and sources
Model. Nineteen ports, twelve months. Destination-capability ceilings are Cruisey assumptions. Berth counts and maximum lengths are published operating limits — see our port network paper and the underlying evidence base. Monthly weights are shaped to the Tauranga 2026-27 forward schedule (CruiseMapper, retrieved 3 September 2026), the only published monthly proxy available; New Zealand has had no official monthly cruise series since Stats New Zealand discontinued it after the year ended June 2020.
Physical check. Calls per port-month capped at cruise berths × days in month; tender-only ports capped at one vessel per day.
Scenario C and D additions. Bledisloe North (330m × 27.5m, Expert Panel decision under s87 Fast-track Approvals Act 2024, 21 August 2025, targeting March 2027); Tauranga Stella Passage (fast-track, panel considering); Lyttelton Te Awaparahi Bay (announced 18 August 2026, complete by 2031). Note that the Tauranga and Lyttelton projects are container-driven and do not mention cruise in scope; their inclusion here assumes cruise benefit from freed capacity, which is a Cruisey assumption.
Everything in this paper is a scenario. No figure in it is a forecast, a commitment, or a statement about any cruise line's intentions.