PORT CANAVERAL — More ships. Bigger ships. These are the driving forces for what is forecast to be a banner year for the world’s second-busiest cruise port — but finding a home for them is getting more difficult.

“We have ships in some of our terminals five and six days a week,” Port Canaveral CEO Capt. John Murray said at the annual State of the Port address Wednesday. “Every Saturday through the winter season, we’ll have six ships. Every terminal will be full on Saturday.”

Murray highlighted the record numbers the port has seen because cruise lines have parked some of their biggest vessels in the last year there with more to come in 2025.

That includes Royal Caribbean’s Star of the Seas, the sister ship to Icon of the Seas. It will take over the title of world’s largest cruise ship when it arrives next summer, capable of carrying close to 10,000 people on board including crew and passengers.

Disney Cruise Line arrives to Port Canaveral with newest ship Disney Treasure

The port also recently welcomed Disney Cruise Line’s newest ship Disney Treasure for its North American debut, and will see Norwegian Cruise Line’s new Norwegian Aqua next spring.

New cruise lines will call the port home for the first time this fall, as well. Princess Cruises arrives next week with the Caribbean Princess and Celebrity Cruises will follow with the Celebrity Equinox in December. That augments multiple ships from Disney, Royal Caribbean and Carnival as well as single vessels from Norwegian and MSC Cruises.

Murray, making the annual presentation for the ninth time, said the efforts to improve the six terminals on site have helped drive two years of record revenues and traffic since the end of the pandemic, but added, “in my view we could do better.”

“We had two years of relatively the same but the next several years are going to escalate for us in a very rapid way,” he said.

In 2023 the port had 11 home ported ships. That grew to 13 in 2024. For 2025, that’s expected to expand to 16.

Passenger traffic, which hit a record for the port close to 7.6 million people in 2024, is forecast to grow next year to 8.4 million from more than 1,000 ship calls, spearheading a budget that forecasts more than $211 million in operating revenue.

“And we parked nearly a million cars,” Murray said about last year’s numbers. “We are a big drive-in market. … If you go through our garages, you’ll see every state in the country.”

It keeps Port Canaveral only behind PortMiami in terms of cruise passenger numbers, but only operating with six terminals.

“It’s a pretty impressive number of folks that move through here, and we’re doing it with fewer terminals than other ports in the south that move a little bit more,” he said. “We’re doing more with less. So I have to say, if you look at it on a per-terminal basis, we are very, very productive.”

That doesn’t mean Port Canaveral doesn’t want to expand.

The port earlier this year had announced plans to pursue a new terminal on the south side that involved moving around marina tenants. But then those plans were trumped temporarily for what was hoped to be a faster option to build on the north side with a goal of getting a new terminal up and running by 2026.

Those quicker plans, though, ran afoul of aerospace interests and state officials threatened to pull funding for other projects if the port continued to pursue the northside terminal. So commissioners pivoted and took those terminal plans off the board.

“On the cruise side we’ve got a problem,” Murray said. “We don’t have that new cruise terminal.

“If we had that cruise tunnel now, we could fill it. The cruise industry has enough interest and enough discussions and long-term plans that they’ve shared with us that they’re ready to go.”

Port Canaveral plots timeline to take over marina for new cruise terminal

Plans are still in play to pursue the originally announced southside terminal on the west side of the inlet, but it’s not a quick solution.

“It’s going to take us a little time. So what do we do in meantime?” Murray asked. “We’ve got bigger ships coming at us and smaller terminals that can’t handle them.”

For now, a small expansion is in the works for Cruise Terminal 5 so it can handle some slightly larger ships and more passengers. It won’t be the largest vessels like Royal Caribbean’s Oasis-class vessels, or even the larger NCL ships like Norwegian Escape, but it could handle more than it can now.

And more parking has come online, with 3,000 more spaces operating within the last month and more planned for the arrival of Star of the Seas next year.

“We’re going to work with what we’ve got,” he said.

Port officials are considering reworking Cruise Terminal 2 where the Victory Casino Cruises ship sails from in addition to the location near the marinas.

“We’ve got two sites, and depending, each one’s got complexities associated with it,” Murray said.

He said Victory officials are fine moving to another location, but there’s a communications line that runs from Patrick Space Force Base to Cape Canaveral that would need to be relocated.

“So we’re dealing with the Space Force on how to get that relocated. That is the big contingency. Does it take a year? Two years? Five years? We don’t know,” Murray said noting previous debate when the idea was first brought to the federal government was over cost to move it. Now the port is willing to pay.

“We’ve approached them now on the idea that we need it moved to build the terminal. We’re not going to build it right away, but we need that cable addressed and we’ll pay for it,” he said. “So now the dynamics a little bit different if you’re going to pay for it.”

Murray also hammered home the notion of fixing up the little things, from cleanliness to ease of getting in and out of the port — all focused on improving the guest experience.

“I tell my people all the time that we don’t want to be less bad than other ports down south,” he said. “We want to be the best.”