Ships as an economic factor in Longyearbyen

Posted on 30. January 2025 by Rolf Stange

In Longyearbyen, as in many other places, not everyone is happy to see cruise ships in the harbour. The cruise industry, especially with its larger ships, is not always welcomed in Longyearbyen.

And the locals have certainly been annoyed by the queues at the post office, the supermarket or the overcrowded café, and drivers regularly react with incomprehension to tourists who mistake the road between the harbour and the town centre for a footpath. It’s all there for all to see on the days in question.

Ships of all sizes come to Longyearbyen. They all leave money there.

What is invisible, however, is what the ships bring to Longyearbyen: economic power in the form of a lot of money. Of course, those who don’t get a seat in the café or slalom down the street at walking pace are not necessarily the ones whose bank accounts fill up. But the amounts are considerable, and a significant part of it is distributed widely through the wages of numerous service providers and sales in shops.

Now we have some figures for 2024:

The somewhat smaller ships (‘expedition ships’) left 235 million kroner (around 20 million euros) in Longyearbyen.
The corresponding figure for the larger cruise ships is 112.5 million kroner (around 9.6 million euros).
Passengers on smaller ships are also ahead when it comes to personal spending: on average, expedition ship passengers spent 8090 kroner (around 690 euros) per person, while cruise ship passengers spent 1886 kroner (160 euros).
Ny-Ålesund benefited from 21,000 visitors who came as tourists on ships with 14 million kroner (approx. 1.2 million euros).

These figures are considerable, especially as these are very small towns: In purely mathematical terms, ship tourists leave behind around 12,000 euros for each of Longyearbyen’s 2500 inhabitants. This includes fees for the harbour, which the municipality owns but cannot freely dispose of for legal reasons, but also hotels, retailers, restaurants and local tour operators.

It would be interesting to know exactly what these sums are spent on and where the money goes. However, this is not clear from the information available. It comes from a report by the Danish consultancy Epinion for the industry association Visit Svalbard. They found the figures so high that they asked Epinion to check for errors before they took it further. However, the report turned out to be correct and some of the key figures have now been published in Svalbardposten.

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