First cruise of the season into Napier, the 298-metre Noordam

Holland America line's Noordam makes the first Napier stop of the 2025-2026 cruise season, for five hours' arrival-to-departure sun in the Bay. Photo / Doug Laing.

The first cruise ship to berth in Napier in the 2025-2026 season has arrived for five hours of sun in the Bay.

The Noordam, a regular through Napier Port since 2015 and which has a capacity of 1996 passengers, berthed at 6.25am, a half-hour ahead of original schedule.

Overnighting from Wellington and departing about midday for Tauranga, it was the shortest stop of eight on a 14-night Sydney-Auckland cruise that started on November 9 and ends on Sunday.

It’s also the first of just 60 cruise stops scheduled for the port between now and the last for the season on April 8, five of them by the Noordam.

The schedule includes 19 different ships, and the number of visits represents a 32.6% decline in just two years, from a record 89 in 2023-2024, in a bounce-back from the Covid years. There were 78 last season.

In the 298-metre-long Noordam’s first season through Napier, in 2015-2016, there were 42 stops.

Missing from the schedule this summer is 348-metre-long Royal Caribbean megaliner Ovation of the Seas, a regular since first berthing in Napier in January 2017.

It was at the time just nine months after its maiden voyage and the largest cruise ship ever to berth in New Zealand.

But sister ship Anthem of the Seas, with a capacity of 4905 passengers and launched in 2015, is due on December 5, for the first of four visits this summer.

Most are on transtasman cruises, but P&O line’s Arcadia, in port on March 1, will be on a 106-day World cruise, Southampton to Southampton.

Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter based in Napier, with more than 42 years reporting for newspapers in the region.