Comment: Headwinds for cruise in Australia

A ship which has been a year-round mainstay of Australian cruising will soon be pulled from the winter cruise calendar Down Under.

The reason? Well, as the local industry has been warning for years, Australia is burdened with high operational costs and complex regulations. In short, we are becoming uncompetitive compared to other destinations vying for the same cruise tourism business.

Carnival Adventure — a long-time Aussie favourite based in Sydney and formerly known as Pacific Adventure under the now-defunct P&O Australia brand — will scale down to a summer seasonal service in Australia from April 2028.

Carnival will continue having a presence in Australia both in Sydney and Brisbane, year-round. But this is a very bad look for Australia more broadly.

This is what Carnival Cruise Line Australia’s country manager Peter Little — who is also the chair of CLIA Australasia — had to say in the late-February announcement: “In this context, Carnival is adjusting its deployment to better capture greater opportunities elsewhere, while continuing to champion a more competitive and certain operating environment — matters we’ve long emphasised.”

Carnival’s decision to relocate Carnival Adventure to North America for the northern hemisphere summer is no minor setback for the local industry. Losing a big ship with a capacity of more than 2600 passengers for several months a year equates to thousands of cabin berths.

It means less choice for cruise holiday-makers locally, and lost tourism income for coastal communities throughout our region.

Adventure’s year-round schedule currently includes affordable cruises for families ranging from two to three-day getaways, to longer voyages on the east coast. The ship also runs many other itineraries to the South Pacific, New Zealand and South-East Asia.

When the shock announcement came, the local industry was already reeling from losing local deployments by Virgin Voyages, Cunard and most recently Disney, as well as more than a billion dollars in economic value last year.

Worse still, Australia risks losing vital cruise tourism and investment to other countries because the industry’s business model relies on long-term planning and certainty.

Our governments are “rolling out the red tape instead of the red carpet” to the world’s cruise lines, the Australian Cruise Association claims.

At the heart of the issue is regulatory complexity as well as high operating costs, including port charges, government fees and regulatory compliance. Added to that are capacity constraints in Sydney.

Latest data from peak body Cruise Lines International Association (Australasia) shows the proportion of Australians who chose to fly to other countries to sail instead of cruise locally grew from 18.5 per cent in 2024 to 19.7 per cent in 2025.

More starkly, total national economic output dropped $1.1 billion to $7.32b (down 13.2 per cent in the year to 2024-25, as did jobs, down 3650). To add to pressures, the summer season just completed had less ships deployed in Australia than the previous year.

As CLIA’s regional managing director Joel Katz says: “Cruise can deliver enormous value for Australia. But we need to stop assuming that ships will come here simply because Australia is beautiful,” in highlighting the competitiveness issue.

Governments need to hear the message and work with the industry to come up with a co-ordinated and consistent policy response, and critical infrastructure investment.

Only this way will Australia be globally competitive and back on the path to sustainable growth.