Next year, 73 cruise ships with a total of up to 257,000 guests and crew members are expected to visit Aarhus – which is a new record. For the first time ever, the city will receive visits from cruise ships in every single month of the year.
“We are experiencing increasing interest in Aarhus as a cruise destination. It is an important business area for us, which we work on in a targeted manner, and therefore I am pleased that in 2026 we can welcome even more cruise ships and guests. It is good for the business community in Aarhus and the entire region,” says Thomas Haber Borch, CEO of Aarhus Havn.
Aarhus Havn expects that up to 85 percent of the ships calling at the cruise quay in 2026 will use the port’s shore power facility.
“There is great willingness among the shipping companies to use shore power when possible, and we can also see this in the numbers, where more and more are connecting to the power supply. When the ships turn off their diesel generators and instead supply themselves with electricity, we reduce particle pollution and remove the noise from the engines for the benefit of both the citizens of Aarhus and the guests,” says Thomas Haber Borch.
In 2024, Aarhus Havn introduced a green charge, which makes it more expensive for cruise ships to choose not to use shore power. This means an extra charge of up to 80,000 kroner for ships that call at the cruise quay and do not connect to shore power.
For the 73 cruise ships, Aarhus is primarily a destination on routes sailing in the Baltic, further up in Northern Europe, and all the way up to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland.
In 2025, 61 cruise ships called at Aarhus Havn.
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