In the first week of June, three men flew into Haines to meet with borough manager Alekka Fullerton. They were executives she hadn’t met from a company she hadn’t heard of. As she learned at the meeting, they manage much of the operations at the borough’s cruise ship dock.

Their visit makes three large corporations that have started circling Haines’ cruise infrastructure in the span of just a few weeks this spring. 

It started with an offer in April from international port management company Global Ports Holding. A few weeks after news of the interest broke, a Miami-based executive from the company touched down in Haines to pitch the public, proposing the company take over management of the dock, many of its costs, and much of its revenue. 

For many in Haines, the question that accompanied the Global Ports offer was one of public versus private control: continue having the borough operate the public dock, or let Global Ports take a crack at it. 

But the visit from the three executives — from Ketchikan-based Survey Point Holdings — has made the question more complicated. Under the current status quo, the small facility is already part of a privately-held management network. 

Amid the wave of interest, it now appears where the borough decides to cast its lot may have implications not just for the two-thousand some residents of the Chilkat Valley, but also for a system of interconnected cruise infrastructure across the state. Specifically, some say, for who makes money from that system, and how. 

The system, as it stands, is centered around Survey Point, with Global Ports — despite touting itself the largest cruise terminal management company in the world — on the outside looking in. 

Currently in Haines, Survey Point and its subsidiaries schedule cruise ships, tie them up when they arrive, deliver ship supplies, and coordinate medical services. The gangways at the dock are owned by the company, as are the Yokohama fenders that floated the F/V Pavlof after it sank in the Small Boat Harbor this winter. One Survey Point executive provided input into design concepts, completed two years ago, for a major Port Chilkoot Dock upgrade.

“In the past all the stuff just happens and no one knows what’s happening behind the scenes,” said Survey Point president Ethan Berto in an interview two weeks ago. “It goes smoothly and no one thinks to ask.”

Fullerton acknowledges she didn’t know much about the system, attributing it at least in part to the fact that it was never in writing. For all of Survey Point’s work at the municipal dock, there has never been a contract or memorandum of understanding between the company and the borough.

In addition to learning more about the company’s operations in Haines, Fullerton and other staff had a second key takeaway from the meeting. Berto, they said, had come to remind the borough of his work specifically because of the Global Ports overture. 

Global Ports has described itself as providing “core port services,” including “handling ships and their passengers and crew through terminal and marine services.” The company’s potential landing in Haines could disrupt what Survey Point does, though neither company will say exactly how. 

“I don’t know enough about what Global Ports is proposing to know if any of these relationships would change,” Berto said, of Survey Point’s operations in Haines. “It could drastically change or potentially might not change at all.” 

On top of current operations, Berto said that knowing now the borough is entertaining management offers for its dock, Survey Point would be interested in a role closer to what Global Ports is offering. 

That puts the two companies in a position of vying for the same infrastructure — a pattern that has played out before. 

In recent years, Global Ports has rapidly expanded, particularly outside its center of operations in Europe and Asia. From 2022 to 2025, it increased one revenue metric in the Americas from $14.7 million to $106 million, largely through ventures in the Caribbean. 

Before Haines, Global Ports had tried unsuccessfully to enter the Alaska market at least twice, bidding on a port management deal in Ketchikan six years ago and on the White Pass railroad and dock in Skagway before that. Both times the company was bidding against Survey Point. 

Whereas Global Ports has been trying to gain a first operation in the state, Survey Point has been bidding from a position at the heart of Alaska’s cruise ship industry. 

In the recent meeting between Survey Point’s executives and borough staff, “a lot of the conversation revolved around all the companies (Berto) owns,” Fullerton said. 

That list of companies connected to Survey Point is long and includes most of the services needed to bring a cruise ship to port — particularly a large foreign-flagged cruise ship subject to more stringent federal regulations.

Ownership of Survey Point itself includes the Berto Family, with Ethan Berto and father Bob Berto, and a 50% stake held by a marine-terminal subsidiary of Blackstone, the private equity firm. 

Under the Survey Point umbrella is Southeast Stevedoring, which ties up ships at port. Subsidiaries Temsco, Coastal, and Northstar Helicopters fly passengers on high-cost shore excursions. Other subsidiaries run port security, emergency response, and tugboat services. Survey Point owns docks in Skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan — the state’s big three cruise ports — as well as its controlling stake in White Pass. 

Perhaps most significantly, under the Survey Point umbrella is Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska, or CLAA. CLAA is responsible for scheduling ship itineraries in every public cruise port in the state, not just Haines, as well as some privately-owned cruise terminals. 

They’re contracted to provide that scheduling service by the cruise lines. The details of the contracts are not known by any port communities in the state, said borough tourism director Rebecca Hylton, and, like in Haines, the company doesn’t have any written agreements with municipalities. 

The scheduling service is a powerful lever to control in a place where, industry experts say, demand for cruise berths far outstrips supply — where cruise towns have miles on end of berthing infrastructure, and still the ports are full.

“Overall there’s a very limited amount of berthing capacity in Southeast,” said former Holland America senior vice president Joseph Slattery. “The port of Juneau is locked down. For a new entry, a cruise line adding capacity, you can’t just come up with an ideal itinerary and expect to be able to operate that.” 

Such high demand for berthing space could theoretically give the owners of the berths a lot of leverage in the market. For instance, in 2019 the City of Ketchikan solicited bids for a so-called preferential berthing agreement. With that model, cruise lines would offer the city cash in exchange for guaranteed space at a public dock. The city at the time asked for a minimum bid of $16.7 million per berth. 

But the city never moved forward with any berthing deals. And putting those kinds of deals on the table is an outlier, because municipalities don’t directly control scheduling at their docks — CLAA does.

And CLAA’s scheduling system doesn’t center around a kind of free market, space for the highest bidder, model. Instead, it operates according to a principle that goes by a number of names, including the “historic berthing model,” and “historic priority scheduling.” Under the historic berthing model, once you get dock space in a certain place at a certain time, you keep it, theoretically, for good.

In a 2021 letter to the Skagway assembly, longtime CLAA Skagway port manager Steward Stephens explained the system as following core principles: for instance, when multiple cruise lines want a slip, “priority is given to the cruise line company that has historically called on that day of the week… historic priority for each port is determined on the length of time a cruise company has been berthing at a particular port,” Stephens wrote. 

That ensures a large number of  slots for the largest cruise lines, specifically Carnival Cruise Line, which has been at the top of a food chain of consolidation. In 1989 and 2002, Carnival, now by far the largest cruise line in the world, acquired Holland America and Princess Cruises, who had dominated the early decades of the modern Alaska cruise industry during the last century. By the time those two former big fish were acquired by Carnival, they had already folded in Sitmar, which had been a large competitor in the Alaska market, and Westours, which was the original modern Alaska cruise operator, running passengers from ships to the White Pass railroad and to motorcoaches out of the Halsingland Hotel in Haines. 

Today, in large ports like Juneau and Ketchikan, berthing rights are “locked up by the big operators,” Slattery said. 

Carnival and CLAA also have formalized business ties outside of the historic berthing rights system. Carnival is the other major party in the White Pass ownership group, with a 45% stake. Together, they purchased the railroad and its associated infrastructure for just under $300 million. The ownership of Survey Point’s dock in Ketchikan gives Survey Point a 55% stake, Carnival (through its subsidiaries) a 30% stake, and Royal Caribbean — the second largest cruise line in the world — a 15% stake. 

Currently, there aren’t a lot of ways to work outside the CLAA system. Alternative models to carve out dock space include what American Cruise Lines does, when it offered Haines financing for a dock in exchange for guaranteed berthing access. Other lines have vessels small enough, and domestically flagged, so as to have fewer infrastructure needs, able to come to shore where other ships can’t, said one small cruise line owner, Dan Blanchard, of Uncruise. 

But by and large, fitting into the big-ship schedule in Alaska means going through CLAA. 

Enter Global Ports, which some say could be an opening in that status quo.

Survey Point seems to think as much. At the meeting between the company and Borough officials, Fullerton said she specifically wrote down one of Berto’s questions that raised the outside company by name: “the question was, if Global Ports Holding were to take over, what would the rest of their itinerary be. If they’re planning to have boats come to Haines, where else would they go,” Fullerton said. 

Slattery, while not speaking directly to the Global Ports versus Survey Point question, did say ports like Haines could pitch themselves as a way in for new operators. 

“In big ports you can’t break in and get 20 straight weeks of a Tuesday berth. Ports like Haines are trying to break in and offer an alternative — Prince Rupert is another one in that category,” Slattery said. Prince Rupert’s facility, in British Columbia, is managed by Global Ports. “It’s an avenue for a new entry to construct a quality itinerary.”

Others more explicitly say that moving outside the current system with Global Ports would benefit Haines.

One of those advocates is former Skagway mayor Andrew Cremata, who is a paid advisor for Global Ports through his personal consulting firm. He doesn’t speak for the company, he said, but insists he does genuinely believe it’s the best option for the Lynn Canal, which is why he agreed to contract with them. 

“(Survey Point) is a private company that has a vested interest in the status quo,” Cremata said. “In my opinion, I think it’s wise for a town like Haines to look outside the existing business model for someone that will come in and get you top dollar.” 

As Skagway mayor, Cremata said, he advocated for his borough to put berthing space at the public docks out for bid, like Ketchikan did, rather than follow CLAA’s system for assigning berth space. Skagway should be getting three to four times (the amount they currently get),” he said. “MSC, Viking, whoever isn’t included in the historic berthing model would be bidding and they would probably bid a lot more money.”

Berto, however, argues that kind of community-to-community bidding system could introduce “huge inefficiencies” and destabilize the industry. 

“It wouldn’t be fair to kick out a ship that’s been coming for years and years just because another company bid a dollar more,” Berto said. 

Plus, he said, municipalities already have the power to charge fees. Haines, for instance, charges cruise ships $9 per passenger each time they dock. “(Cruise lines) are all paying the posted tariff,” Berto said. “They’re all paying what Haines is asking them to pay.” Still, that’s a payment for use of the facility after scheduling is done, different from a payment for guaranteed use of the facility at a specific time or volume.

Global Ports themselves haven’t made any public mention of putting dock space out for bid. And if it did successfully do so, it doesn’t appear that higher berthing fees would translate directly to borough revenue. 

The company hasn’t submitted an official term sheet yet, but has said it expects in a deal all the fees the borough currently charges cruise ships to dock it would instead collect. 

When asked if his company would use CLAA to schedule ships when managing the Haines facility, Colin Murphy, the Global Ports executive who visited Haines, noted that the company doesn’t have “vested interests,” but said it would “work with whatever booking method our cruise customers prefer.” 

Rather, the conversation in the Chilkat Valley in favor of bucking the current system has centered around increasing passenger count. Supporters of a Global Ports deal say doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the town’s annual cruise ship visitation could be an essential economic lifeline. 

“We used to have 25 to 30 employees,” Pioneer Bar and Bamboo Room owner Christy Tengs-Fowler said to Murphy in May. “We have a building that could serve hundreds of people a day but it’s just sitting there. It’s not sustainable, and businesses are going to close… I feel lucky you came here and I hope we listen and learn and try to work with you. To me it’s like a godsend.”

Many people — including industry experts, executives from the competing companies, and borough leaders — say those are the questions Haines has to settle first and foremost, of how many passengers the community really wants, and what it hopes development will look like.

Answers to those questions will shape what kinds of deals the borough assembly is open to. But even if the community can reach some kind of consensus there, it might not lead to a clear answer about which company to go with. 

Survey Point, Global Ports, and a third interested company, Huna Totem Corporation, have all said Haines’ “local character” is a selling point for the town — something they’d work to maintain. All say they can get boats into port, too. Global Ports has explicitly cited that as a main goal, potentially increasing traffic from roughly 67,000 passengers to eventually 300,000. 

Berto as well said he saw traffic to Haines as decreasing congestion at larger ports, and not competing with them. But he added that he would be “skeptical of any terminal operator that said they could guarantee growth.”

“Ultimately cruise lines are ones that make decisions about where they’re going. Terminal operators don’t own ships or control where they go.”

Amid all the different pitches, one point of differentiation is that Survey Point is the only company with something to take away.

Coordinating cruise ships in the region requires weaving together a whole host of considerations: “an orchestration of port availability, logistics, navigation, fuel consumption, speeds, everything that makes the itinerary work,” as Slattery put it. That’s work Survey Point and CLAA are already doing. 

Former Haines tourism director Steven Auch used the word orchestration as well. “CLAA looks at the entire orchestration of everything that’s happening,” he said. “If I had a dock, I’d rather somebody was able to look at the larger picture and slide things around according to that… of course you can look at it as someone holding that and using it as leverage. Sure, welcome to negotiations 101.” 

Ethan Berto himself was yet a third to use the word orchestration. When he talked about what his companies do, he said he didn’t think many understood how complex it was. Shifting the system, he said, could have consequences. 

“As things get busier they have to be even more orchestrated, and they get very complex,” he said. “Every time you change something in a complex system it creates problems somewhere else.”

There’s no final decision on how the borough government will weigh all these considerations.

As of Monday, Fullerton said the borough and Global Ports are getting closer to finalizing a term sheet. Fullerton also said she has now been officially notified of interest from Huna Totem Corporation, and is not ruling out officially soliciting offers from all interested companies.