This year, the country's municipalities can look forward to receiving much more money from the cruise industry.
Statistics Greenland has published how many cruise passengers visited Greenland in 2025. The number landed at 93,897 passengers, which is a decrease of 1.4 percent compared to 2024.
The good news when you delve into the numbers is that the guests accounted for a total of 213,674 visits to the ports of Greenland, which is an increase of 17.8 percent compared to the previous year. Since a port call triggers a so-called environmental and maintenance fee of 50 kroner per passenger, the municipalities will have a much larger amount to improve the conditions in the affected ports of call
Greatest progress
The figures show that it is Paamiut and Nuuk in particular that have experienced a significant growth in visitors. Here, the number increased by 24,677 and 6,914 passengers respectively compared to the previous year, which corresponds to a tax increase of over 1.5 million kroner for the capital municipality alone for the two cities.
However, the development is not only upward. Nanortalik thus received 5,037 fewer passenger visits, while Ilulissat experienced a decline of 3,234 fewer passengers.
The top scorer list for the number of passengers distributed by port in 2025 looks like this - in brackets the ranking in 2024:
The great progress for Paamiut thus pushed Ilulissat out of the top 5 list.
The Danish Tax Agency is responsible for collecting the environmental and maintenance tax, which is subsequently distributed to the individual municipalities.
Most Americans
It was mainly Americans who chose to visit Greenland on a cruise ship.
More than half – 47,577 - of the total number of cruise passengers came from the USA, followed by 10,926 Germans and 6,739 from the UK. Then came Canadian and Australian tourists.
