Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, the parent of Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises, and Regent Seven Seas, has published its latest annual sustainability report, setting out the progress the group says it made across its environmental and social goals in 2025.
It is the kind of corporate document that rarely makes a holidaymaker’s reading list, but it is a useful prompt to ask a question more cruisers are starting to consider: how green is cruising really becoming, and should it influence which line you book?
What NCL is reporting
NCLH’s 2025 report, published under its Sail & Sustain banner, is organised around five themes spanning the environment, safety, its workforce, the communities it visits, and corporate accountability. The headline environmental points are the ones most relevant to passengers.
The company points to continued investment in shore power, the ability for a docked ship to plug into a port’s electricity grid and switch off its engines; progress on alternative fuels, including biofuel and groundwork towards methanol and liquefied natural gas for some future ships; and biodiversity work such as eDNA monitoring, which samples seawater for traces of genetic material to track marine life around the areas its ships operate.
Taken at face value, these are real and sensible steps, and NCL is far from alone in taking them.
But a single company’s report only tells part of the story, and the more useful question is where the industry as a whole now stands.
The wider shift across the industry
Sustainability has moved from the margins to the centre of cruise-ship design over the past few years, and the direction of travel is clear across almost every major line.
Cleaner fuels are the most visible change. A growing number of new ships run on liquefied natural gas, which burns more cleanly than traditional marine fuel, and lines including MSC, Costa, Carnival, and others have LNG-powered vessels in service or on order.
The industry is also experimenting with methanol and biofuels, and 2026 brings a genuine milestone in Viking Libra, billed as the world’s first hydrogen-powered cruise ship.
Shore power is the other big one. When a ship can plug into the local grid in port, it can shut down its diesel generators and stop burning fuel while docked, which cuts both emissions and air pollution in the port city.
The catch is that both the ship and the port need the right equipment, and shore-power infrastructure is still patchy across the world’s cruise destinations, so the capability is only useful where it exists at both ends.
Onboard efficiency covers the less glamorous work: better hull design, waste-heat recovery, advanced water treatment, reductions in single-use plastics, and smarter routing to save fuel.
None of it grabs headlines, but cumulatively it matters.
The honest picture
All of that progress is real, and it deserves credit. But it would be misleading to suggest cruising has become a low-impact way to travel.
A large cruise ship is an enormous, energy-hungry floating resort, and even the cleaner options come with caveats. LNG burns more cleanly than heavy fuel oil but is still a fossil fuel, and it carries concerns about methane slip, the escape of unburned methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Hydrogen and methanol are promising but currently apply to a tiny handful of ships. Shore power only helps where ports have invested in it.
There is also the wider footprint beyond emissions: the strain that very large ships place on small destinations, the waste they generate, and the environmental cost of getting passengers to and from the ship, often by air.
The industry is moving in the right direction, but it is early in a long journey, and a healthy scepticism towards any single glossy sustainability report is warranted. The meaningful test is consistent, independently verifiable progress over years, not the language of any one annual update.
What it means if you are booking
If the environmental footprint of your holiday matters to you, there are a few practical things worth weighing. Newer ships are generally more efficient and more likely to run on cleaner fuels, so the age and technology of the vessel makes a difference.
No-fly cruising from a UK port avoids the considerable emissions of long-haul flights to join a ship overseas, which is one of the larger parts of a cruise holiday’s total footprint and a genuine advantage of sailing from Southampton or a regional port.
And if it matters to you, it is reasonable to look at a line’s actual record and published targets rather than its marketing, and to ask your travel agent direct questions about a specific ship’s fuel and shore-power capability.
The bottom line
NCL’s latest report is one data point in a much bigger story: an industry investing seriously in cleaner technology while still carrying a substantial environmental footprint.
For cruisers, the sensible position is neither to dismiss the progress as mere spin nor to take every green claim at face value, but to recognise genuine improvement, stay clear-eyed about how far there is to go, and make the choices within your control, such as sailing on newer ships and cutting out unnecessary flights, that actually move the needle.
