Eight additional cruise ship visits have been added to Haines’s schedule this season after Skagway’s Railroad Dock was damaged by two more rockslides on Aug. 3 and 5.

An initial slide on June 23 closed the dock for nearly two weeks and diverted two ships scheduled for Skagway – including the gargantuan Majestic Princess, the largest ship ever to stop at the Port Chilkoot dock.

The two latest slides, along with engineers’ warnings of a bigger one yet to come, led Skagway Mayor Andrew Cremata to issue an emergency declaration on Thursday. White Pass & Yukon Route (WPYR), the company that owns the affected dock, closed its forward berth for the remainder of the season.

Between Aug. 7 and Oct. 22, 29 cruise ships originally scheduled to moor in Skagway will be redirected, according to data provided by Skagway tourism director Jaime Bricker.

Of Haines’s eight added visits, three will be from smaller Silversea luxury cruise ships, which hold fewer than 600 passengers. Three others will be from the Viking Orion — which has a capacity of 960 and will dock in Haines three times in August and September. And the Royal Princess will call on Haines twice, on Aug. 16 and 30. Like the Majestic Princess, it can hold up to 3,600 passengers, though Haines Borough tourism director Steve Auch said he expects closer to 2,500 on each trip.

The diverted ships could bring as many as 9,000 additional tourists to Haines. Auch said surveys have suggested the average cruise passenger spends $111 in any given Southeast Alaska port town — though he cautioned that these numbers are based on pre-pandemic spending patterns.

The emergency declaration claimed that Skagway “has experienced multiple life-threatening landslides every year over … the Railroad Dock.” However, WPYR executive director Tyler Rose said the last time they had to shut down a berth was in late 2017. Friday’s slide damaged the security booth, which passengers pass through to re-board their vessels, as well as shipping containers that had been stacked along the pier to shield pedestrians from further disasters.

Railroad Dock mostly serves large cruise ships, Rose said, since it’s the only dock in Skagway equipped to handle “neo panamax vessels.” Neo panamax ships, so called because they are the largest ships that can fit through the Panama Canal, include the Majestic Princess and the Royal Princess.

When possible, these mega-ships will be routed to Sitka and Icy Strait, Auch said. He called Cruise Lines Agencies of Alaska the “big chess-board manager” in determining alternate routes, and said he believes they consider available deep-water ports as well as the tour capacity of a given community. Haines is more likely to get Skagway’s smaller offloads.

Sitka’s visitor services coordinator said that before the August slide, five ships had already been sent to their dock from Skagway — four with capacities greater than 3,500 passengers.

Auch said it’s possible they’ll get word of more cruises redirected to Haines, but he thinks most of the adjusted itineraries have now been settled.