For the first time, over 2 million passengers will be handled (+10% on 2024) thanks to over 1,000 cruise ship calls (+17% on 2024). The leading Italian island in terms of number of ship calls (over 1,000, +17% on 2024) and cruise ports (12). In the three-year period 2026-2028, approximately 500 million investments are expected in Sicilian ports with positive repercussions for cruise tourism on the island.
This is the end-of-year estimate that emerges from a new study by Rispetti Turismo, a research and consultancy company serving the tourism macro-industry which has created and organized since 2011 Italian Cruise Day, the itinerant forum of reference for cruise tourism in Italy, scheduled this year in Catania (Vecchia Dogana) on Friday 24 October in partnership with the Port System Authority of the Eastern Sea of Sicily.
A goal to which the results of the 12 regional ports that will have welcomed cruises in 2025 have contributed (Palermo, Messina, Catania, Syracuse, Giardini Naxos, Trapani, Lipari, Porto Empedocle, Pozzallo, Milazzo, Licata and Termini Imerese) and which will lead Sicily to almost double the number of cruise passengers handled in the last 10 years (in 2016 there were just over 1.1 million).
«Sicily has long been among the regions that contribute most to making the cruise sector dynamic and that benefit most from the economic and other benefits associated with it», declares Francesco di Cesare – President of Rispetti Turismo. «It is the result not only of the attractive force of the island – continues di Cesare – but also of the commitment that, increasingly over the years, have been made by the Port System Authorities, the Municipal Administrations, the terminal management companies and all the operators active in the tourism and port sectors. In 2025 there will be 56 companies calling at Sicilian ports, demonstrating how the stopover alternatives and the number of on-shore visit possibilities lend themselves to attracting and satisfying the requests of essentially all customer segments who choose this type of holiday. Precisely a common vision in believing in the prospects of this sector can guarantee, not only, growing results in terms of traffic but also compliance with the conditions so that growth is solid, sustainable, and of common advantage for local communities”.
The ranking of Sicilian cruise ports
According to the researchers at Rispetti Turismo, at the end of the year Palermo will confirm itself as the first Sicilian cruise port, exceeding one million passengers handled for the first time and recording 280 ship calls. On the other two steps of the podium, respectively, Messina (over 760 thousand cruise passengers handled and 250 ship calls) and Catania, which will exceed 200 thousand passengers handled for the eighth time in its history, once again ensuring its permanence among the top Italian ports (at the end of 2025, 14th place). Results that will find the opportunity to be highlighted during the twelfth edition of Italian Cruise Day.
«We are happy and honored to host such an important event for the cruise world for the first time in Catania – underlines the president of the Port System Authority of the Eastern Sicilian Sea Francesco Di Sarcina – the Etna port, in fact, has an excellent vocation for cruise tourism, as demonstrated by the constantly growing data. In general, eastern Sicily undoubtedly offers extraordinary opportunities aimed at building new scenarios for cruise tourism, which must be exploited to the fullest through a strengthening of the infrastructural network and tourist offer, which ranges from historical – cultural places to food and wine delicacies and scenic destinations. In this sense – continued Di Sarcina – the ports of Catania, Syracuse and Pozzallo must play, in a virtuous and synergistic way, a fundamental role to ensure that south-eastern Sicily can become a national and international reference for cruise tourism. In this regard we can point out that at the end of the 2025 season in Catania we will have had 5 maiden calls, in Syracuse 16 and in Pozzallo 1. In this regard I would like to say that the maiden call in Pozzallo, the Oceania Nautica with 659 passengers, like some in Syracuse and Catania, are the fruit of the work of the last three years of this AdSP which organized two fam trips to introduce new destinations to managers of the cruise companies that were already calling on our ports and those that had not yet chosen us. Among the new generation companies we are pleased to be able to mention the Orient Express, the most luxurious cruise company in the world, which has chosen one of our ports in 2026 with three ship calls and 6 calls in 2027. Our AdSP has therefore been moving for some time to recover the existing infrastructural and organizational gaps – concluded the president of the AdSP – and plan the activities that will achieve, in order to allow the achievement of ambitious, but possible and future, goals”.
Sicily among the top cruise regions in Italy
As regards the ranking of regional cruise traffic, according to the estimates of the researchers at Rispetti Turismo, Sicily will confirm itself in first place at the end of the year, not only for the quantity of ship calls but also for the number of cruise ports in which ships will have landed. For the number of cruise passengers handled, it will compete with Campania for the third step of the podium (2.1 and 2.2 million cruise passengers handled respectively). It should also be highlighted that Sicily is one of the most “seasonally adjusted” regions in Italy with over 60% of traffic recorded outside the summer quarter (therefore in the autumn-winter and spring period between September and May). This is demonstrated by the fact that in 2024 it was precisely an off-season month, October, that set records for passengers welcomed (over 276 thousand).
Furthermore, demonstrating the centrality of the region in the dynamics of the Italian cruise geography, it should be noted that nine companies out of ten of those calling in Italy this year have visited at least one Sicilian port (56 out of 64, 87.5%). Among the Sicilian airports, Palermo is the one that welcomes the largest number of companies (38, equal to 60% of the companies that call in Italy), followed by Messina (29, 45.3%) and Catania (24, 37.5%). Finally, thanks to the estimated results of Palermo (fourth Italian cruise port) and Messina (eighth), in 2025 Sicily will be the second most represented Italian region in the ranking of the top 20 cruise ports in the Mediterranean behind Liguria (ports of Genoa, Savona and La Spezia).
Investments in cruise tourism in Sicily
In its continuous activity of mapping investments in Italian cruise ports, Rispetti Turismo has detected approximately 500 million in investments expected in the next three years (2026-2028) in Sicilian cruise ports of which, among the main ones, 222 million dedicated to the construction of new infrastructures and modernization of existing systems, 65.5 million reserved for the dredging of port seabed and 62.9 million distributed across various projects concerning numerous cruise terminals in the region (among the most significant, 30 million for a new cruise terminal in Trapani and 23.4 million for the new cruise terminal and the dock of the Crispi pier in Porto Empedocle). Finally, numerous investments have been launched and linked to the PNRR regarding the electrification of the Sicilian docks (cold ironing), a total of 171.2 million euros of which 115.2 million in the three-year period 2023-2025 and 56 million euros in the three-year period 2026-2028.