Oceanwide Expeditions has told travel partners it will apply a fuel surcharge to Antarctic voyages departing between 15 November and 31 December 2026, in a notice circulated this week and seen by Antarctica Travel News. The charge is set at EUR 25 a night, or USD 29, and it attaches to existing as well as new reservations aboard m/v Hondius, m/v Ortelius and m/v Plancius. The notice describes the surcharge as non-commissionable, and says revised invoices for confirmed travellers will follow shortly.
The operator frames the move as partial. It says it will absorb the majority of the increase itself, that the amount passed on has been kept as low as possible, and that a decision on the remaining departures of the 2026-27 Antarctic season will come later. Nothing about the Antarctic charge appears on the company's public press page or on its dates and rates page, which carried an update stamp of 10 September 2026 and no surcharge line. This is, for now, a trade communication rather than a published change.
Why marine gas oil, and why Ushuaia
Expedition ships in polar waters cannot take the cheap way out. The Antarctic Treaty area bans heavy fuel oil outright and the Polar Code tightens the constraint further, so vessels working the peninsula burn low-sulphur marine gas oil, a distillate that trades at a premium to residual bunkers and follows crude closely.
That premium has widened sharply. Following the disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz that began in late February, marine gas oil rose faster than crude itself, with bunker markets reporting distillate gains far outpacing the barrel. On 18 August low-sulphur marine gas oil was quoted at roughly 1,404 dollars a tonne in Fujairah and 1,271 in Rotterdam, close to double the very low sulphur fuel oil that conventional cruise ships lift on the same day. Brent has swung between the high seventies and the low hundreds across the year.
Ushuaia adds a second layer. Argentine fuel pricing has been held artificially flat through a series of staged increases and a buffer mechanism at YPF, deferring rather than removing the pass-through of higher crude, while Tierra del Fuego pump prices climbed through seven separate increases in March alone. Bunkering at the bottom of the continent also carries transport and logistics costs that a Rotterdam or Singapore lift does not.
Nobody else has said it out loud
Oceanwide is not the first operator to move in 2026. Star and Dream Cruises imposed a per-night fuel charge in March, then reduced or waived it in June as the market eased. Beyond that the mainstream lines have gone the other way in public. P and O, Princess, Cunard, Fred Olsen, Crystal and Ambassador all told the trade in April that they had no plans to surcharge, and Royal Caribbean is reported to be substantially hedged for the year. Cruise Lines International Association has taken no position beyond monitoring the market.
Among polar specialists the record is silence rather than refusal. No public statement could be found from Quark, HX, Aurora, Ponant, Lindblad, Silversea, Swan Hellenic, Antarctica21, Polar Latitudes or the others selling the same season, in either direction. That is characteristic of the segment: these decisions travel by agent email, not press release, and the 2022 wave that saw Oceanwide levy an identical nightly amount was documented almost entirely in traveller complaints rather than trade coverage.
What the contract allows
Oceanwide's published terms, issued in December 2022, reserve the right to raise the agreed amount for unforeseeable increases in items including fuel, but require notification at the latest sixty days before departure and forbid any increase inside that window. An increase above five percent gives the traveller a free cancellation. On that reading, a change touching 15 November departures had to reach travellers by the middle of September, which is where the calendar now sits.
European package travel rules push in the same direction. Directive 2015/2302 permits fuel-driven increases only where the contract expressly reserves them, demands a clear justification and calculation on a durable medium at the latest twenty days before departure, and grants a fee-free termination above eight percent. It also runs symmetrically: if the same costs fall before departure, the traveller is owed a reduction. Oceanwide has said it will keep watching the market, and the symmetry clause means that watching cuts both ways.
The non-commissionable framing is the part the trade will feel. Agents have spent 2026 campaigning against non-commissionable fares, with a joint statement from more than thirty industry bodies in January and a May analysis putting the erosion of effective cruise commission at a fifth to a quarter. A surcharge that lands entirely outside commission arrives into that argument.