Cruise Hive’s “most dangerous port” list is out
Cruise Hive’s new ranking of “most dangerous cruise ports” includes a mix of places that genuinely merit caution and others that feel like they were added more for shock value than accuracy. The biggest issue is that the list treats every port with the same blanket label of “dangerous,” even though the risks in each destination come from very different sources and affect cruise passengers in very different ways.
They start with Labadee, Haiti. This is misleading because Labadee is a private Royal Caribbean resort that operates as a secure bubble, physically separated from the rest of the country. While Haiti is under a Level 4 State Department advisory, cruise passengers stepping onto Labadee aren’t experiencing the same environment as travelers entering Port-au-Prince. Using national crime data to judge a walled-off resort isn’t an honest comparison.
Nassau is also on the list. Yes, Nassau has crime like any major Caribbean city, but the article doesn’t acknowledge that millions of cruise passengers visit every year without incident and mostly remain in the well-secured port district or on ship-approved excursions. Instead of explaining which areas are riskier or which scams are common, Cruise Hive paints the entire port as dangerous in a vague, generalized way that isn’t actually useful to travelers.
Roatán, Honduras, appears next. Honduras overall has some of the highest crime rates in the region, but Roatán is a separate island with a heavy reliance on tourism and a very different safety profile. Cruise passengers generally move through structured excursions or private beaches. Again, the article pulls national statistics without accounting for how cruise visits actually work.
Mexico gets two entries: Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta. Here the nuance is especially lacking. Acapulco has well-known issues with cartel violence, but Puerto Vallarta is one of the safest and most tourist-friendly cities in Mexico. Lumping them together as if they pose the same level or type of danger is lazy. If a ranking doesn’t distinguish between genuinely high-risk cities and overwhelmingly safe tourist zones, then it isn’t a ranking—it’s clickbait.
Belize City is another port singled out. Like many cities in Central America, parts of Belize City can be rough, but the cruise tourism zone is tightly controlled, and most passengers leave via pre-organized tours. The article fails to explain that the risk for someone wandering far from the port is very different from the risk for someone stepping onto a ship-sponsored bus.
The list then pivots hard into Europe by naming Barcelona and Athens. These inclusions make the criteria even more confusing. Neither port has significant violent crime concerns for tourists. The main issues are pickpockets and petty theft in crowded tourist areas. Those are real annoyances, but placing Barcelona in the same category as Acapulco or mainland Honduras is a bizarre equivalence.
The strangest item on the list is Antarctica. There is no crime danger at all; the risk is purely environmental. Weather, remoteness, and emergency-response logistics are the real hazards, and none of that has anything to do with the type of “danger” that defines the rest of the list. It feels like they threw it in to round out the numbers.
Overall, the Cruise Hive list lacks consistency, context, and methodological clarity. It mixes crime-related risks, crowd-related risks, and environmental hazards without explaining how they were weighed against each other. It also fails to distinguish between danger for independent travelers and danger for cruise passengers, who operate within a controlled tourism framework. As a result, it creates more fear than insight. A more useful approach would explain specific risks for each port, how commonly they affect cruise guests, and practical, realistic ways to stay safe without demonizing entire destinations.
All that said, I recommend taking organized excursions at the following ports mentioned in the roundup: Acapulco, Roatan, Belize City, Nassau.
