Cruise Season 2025

 

(Kiel, 26th April 2025) The arrival of the AIDAnova at the Ostseekai on Saturday morning heralds the start of this year's cruise season in Kiel. 29 ships from 18 shipping companies will call at the PORT OF KIEL a total of 175 times this year. During the height of the summer, three cruise ships will call at the port at the same time almost every Saturday. With the CARNIVAL MIRACLE and the VISTA, two ships are also expected that have never been to Kiel before. As in previous years, this year's cruise season extends into the winter months. For the third year in a row, the port of Kiel is expecting one million cruise passengers, making it one of the busiest cruise ports in Northern Europe.

 

‘It will be the cruise season in which we finalise our shore power strategy in terms of construction. As planned, we will complete the work on the expansion facility at the Ostseekai in autumn and will then have supply capacities for up to three cruise ships and four ferries,’ says Dr Dirk Claus, Managing Director of SEEHAFEN KIEL GmbH & Co. KG, ‘a key step towards our personal environmental goals, which we want to achieve by fully supplying the ships with green electricity in the coming years.’

The construction of the shore power extension at the Ostseekai is the final step in the completion of the shore power infrastructure, which the port of Kiel was one of the first ports to initiate back in 2018. The port has invested 50 million euros in this technology so far, which supplied over half of the ferry and cruise calls with green electricity last year. ‘We have a huge demand for shore power in the cruise sector. We had originally planned a connection rate of 80 per cent of all ocean-going cruise ships for this season. However, due to the construction work, which also affects the existing shore power system at the Ostseekai, there will be a technical outage lasting several weeks, which will affect around 19 calls. Accordingly, we expect a connection rate of around 70 per cent this year,’ says Claus.

With the new building at the Ostseekai, baggage handling in the terminal will also be comprehensively modernised and the associated processes optimised. The aim is to meet the requirements of larger cruise ships and to realise a functionally and architecturally coherent extension. The extension to the shore power system at the Ostseekai, which is being funded by the federal and state governments, will go into operation in the autumn.

Shore power is one of the key technologies for making shipping in ports more environmentally friendly. By supplying electricity via a suitable system while the ship is at berth, the ship's engines can be switched off and, in addition to CO2, noise and pollutant emissions can be avoided. The implementation of the technology involves considerable investment for the ports and shipping companies. In terms of a sustainable concept, it is necessary that the electricity for the systems does not come from fossil fuels but from renewable energies. The PORT OF KIEL has been using European green electricity for its shore-based power supply for years. ###