"In the end, our guests don't want to go to a place that's overcrowded," Donald said. "If the sites that everybody wants to see are being abused, our guests won't go. It's in our self-interest, but it's also in the interest of the places we go,” commented the CEO of Carnival Cruises, Arnold Donald, about Dubrovnik at the recent Seatrade Cruise Global convention.

This year Dubrovnik will start to tackle the problem of overcrowding, a subject that is extremely important to the Mayor of Dubrovnik, Mato Franković, and one way is to regulate the arrival times of cruise ships.

This was backed up by Donald in Miami at the Seatrade Fair as he said that major cruise lines had agreed to coordinate their summer schedules in the city, meaning that some ships could arrive later or earlier than planned to avoid the so called “cruise ship crush.”

Last year, Dubrovnik received around 742,000 passengers on 538 cruise ships. Recent research for the port of Dubrovnik showed that in 2016 arrivals exceeded 8,000 on 18 occasions and 10,000 passengers on just four days. And it is expected that with this new move to reschedule arrival times these number will be even less this year.