Is Dubrovnik enforcing cruise ship limits (hours/# ships)?

According to the Dubrovnik Port Authority, cruise ship limits are a real thing! The Port Authority’s website (portdubrovnik.hr) says 40 ships were not allowed to dock so far this year. It also says there are about six days this summer when the limit will be temporarily lifted and a few thousand more passengers will be allowed on those specific dates. This is the transition period when the Port Authority is working to break in the new rules and work with the industry.

The proprietor of the guesthouse we stayed at inside the Old Town’s walls will be thrilled ( along with many visitors) because he told us “Cruise ships ruined Dubrovnik.”

A site that helps you avoid days when multiple cruise ships are in any specific port is www.CruiseMapper.com

Cheers!

I believe the 8 hours is a minimum stay, not maximum (and it’s 12 hours for the biggest ships). They’d rather have fewer ships come and stay longer than a lot of short port calls which maximizes congestion and minimizes passengers spending money in the town. The limits (and any exceptions thereto) are enforced when the cruise lines make their port reservations which is done far in advance.

“ After reading online that Dubrovnik has put limits on how many cruise ships can call on the city per day (2) and for only up to 8 hours, ”

It seems you have misinterpreted the rules. Ships up to 4000 passengers must stay a MINIMUM of 8 hours. Ships of more than 4000 passengers must stay even longer and stay AT LEAST 12 hours.
These minimum stays of 8 or 12 hours are so that, the local restaurants etc can profit from the cruise ship visits.

You can find the rules for 2026 here; https://www.portdubrovnik.hr/datoteke/cruiseshipberthingpolicy202620240729133054.pdf

Edited to add; I missed the post written by Slate. Luckily we both came to the same conclusion :-)

4000 tourists at any given time works out to almost 3 tourists for every citizen living in old town. Throw in the other tourists and maybe 6 tourists for every local. But its a large city within the walls and it can handle it.

Thank you for responding. I can understand requiring longer stays since those cruise passengers MIGHT spend more money in town (they might also take a siesta on the boat and eat the ship food). However, it stinks for those of us who are staying in town and want to only have to compete for limited sights with other land-based tourists, instead of the thousands of cruise passengers. The old advice of doing things early and later in the day to avoid the hordes will no longer hold if ships are docked all day long, including as early as 4 am and as late as midnight. I think the new rule to require ships be in port for at least 8-12 hours will hurt land tourism in the end, and we're the ones that actually spend money locally. I'll be there four days, getting all my meals, lodging, etc from locals (plus being in the country for two weeks). I'll be on the lookout for these kinds of rules in the future, and I might choose not to visit places like this moving forward.

For some background, prior to 2019 Dubrovnik
was receiving as many as 13 cruise ship passengers during a single day. The new regulations will cap that to two cruise ships during one day.

I was fortunate to visit Dubrovnik during 2021 when NO cruise ships were in port because the industry had frozen during the pandemic.

Now—those were the days of travel dreams.

I looked at the number of cruise ships that came to Dubrovnik in 2023 and 2024 and the number of passengers in the same two years. The limit of 2 ships and 8.000 tourists (two groups of 4.000) appears to be within the 2022 and 2023 norm, so my guess is that, beyond trimmig out days of exception to the norm, the new rules will do very little if anything to reduce the number of cruise ship tourists in Dubrovnik. What it will do is assist in Dubrovnik in making better profit off each cruise ship passenger.

And that makes sense as I am not sure why they would want to limit tourism for the sake of limiting tourism? The city inside the walls where the tourists go isnt a functioning city, its a commercial tourist entertainment enterprise. You fill it and keep filling it with tourists until the numbers begin to fall, then you back up a little. Apparenlty they have yet to reach when the number drop off because of the crowds.

Anyone would think from reading this that Dubrovnik got barely any tourists except cruise ship passengers, that it was a sleepy little backwater.

Yet Dubrovnik Airport handled 2 million passengers in 2023.

If I was on a cruise ship docking very early or leaving late I would be taking full advantage of having the city to myself while all those staying in the city were back in their hotels, because they only keep tourist hours.
If there were no cruise ship passengers at all the city would still be crowded out with hordes of people. There are multiple ways of travelling, this sense of superiority of not being a cruise ship passenger is not at all helpful.
It is equally possible to criticise those who fly in, and who probably don't use the local public transport.

The city benefits from the docking fees, locals are employed in driving the tour buses, and employing guides on the buses. It isn't a linear equation. Very likely some of those buses will be going out of the city to other cities.

isn31c, i agree. "Dubrovnik recorded 4,555,636 overnight stays and 1,397,052 arrivals" So just a gut feeling that in the high/shoullder season maybe 25.000+ tourists there at any give time. Its about the same size as DisneyLand but is still only doing half the daily attendance of DisneyLand so there is room to grow.

And Dubrovnik does still have people living within the walls, we know a few. So why you would say it isn’t a functioning city is not correct.
Also People who live just outside walls attend Mass in the churches within the walls.

Many of us missed the boat, so to say. I was there 2 years ago and it was crowded. I had thought about Croatia 5 years ago but did not go.
No getting around it. It is crowded even with no cruise ships. It s a finite are. One main street and the walls. The math of tourists does not compute well for that.

Cruise ships for Dubrovnik already have to use a port behind the city and get bussed over. It might be a ten minute ride, I forget.