Souda: unscheduled call with 3,463 passengers

The cruise ship Azura, operated by P&O Cruises, made an unscheduled call at the port of Souda on the morning of Saturday 15 August 2026, carrying 3,463 passengers. The information was given by the chairman of the Port Fund of Chania Prefecture, Dimitris Virirakis. The original plan for the voyage provided for a call at Santorini from 08:00 to 18:00, which was cancelled because of the gale-force northerly winds blowing across the South Aegean. The departure from Souda was placed by one source at 18:00, while another referred generally to the late afternoon. The ship berthed at the quay, without any need to ferry passengers ashore by tender.

Moving calls from Santorini to other ports is not unusual when strong northerly winds prevail. At Santorini cruise ships anchor in the caldera and passengers are taken ashore by tender, a procedure that becomes dangerous in conditions above a certain limit of wind and swell. The bay of Souda, by contrast, is naturally sheltered and allows berthing at the quay, which makes it the most reliable alternative port in the area for ships of this size. Itinerary changes of this kind are decided by the captain in consultation with the company and the port authorities, and are announced to passengers a few hours in advance.

For Chania, the unscheduled call means immediate economic activity on a day that was already busy. Passengers usually head for the old town, the Venetian harbour and organised excursions into the interior, with retail and transport absorbing the greater part of the spending. The Port Fund of Chania Prefecture has set in motion an expansion of the cruise infrastructure at Souda, with a tender for the construction of a cruise section and seabed dredging, as part of a wider funded project. Souda also functions as a commercial and passenger port, which requires coordination so that an unscheduled call does not affect the scheduled ferry services to Piraeus.

The day of the Dormition of the Virgin found Crete on fire risk category 4 and with wind gusts that in the south exceeded 100 kilometres per hour, as TodayGrid recorded in the report “Crete: category 4 and red code on Saturday”. The same conditions that cancelled the call at Santorini also affected ferry services in the Aegean. For Chania, cruise traffic is a variable but growing quantity, with arrivals spread from April to October. More from the area on the Chania page. For Santorini, by contrast, cancelled calls because of winds are a recurring issue that has also been raised in the debate about capping daily cruise ship arrivals.